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Discussion (359 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
- For Claude.ai subscriptions I think Sonnet is much cheaper than Opus. This is why there was a "Sonnet only" usage bar for Max tier for the longest time.
- For some tasks the sheer amount of raw input tokens is the most important. For example multimodal computer use tasks. You can't make them any more efficient on Opus by turning down the reasoning, so a cheaper model like Sonnet is useful for them
it's still there. I still don't totally grok why I can't use all my tokens on Sonnet if I want to... maybe that signals something?
In practice, I tend to just use the default on Claude Code that works well enough. But I wonder to what degree other users really play around with these settings to optimize for their project.
Understandable frankly.
I don't really believe this however, because so much time is spent fixing up after models, that a slower but more intelligent model is a net time saver in my experience.
However, I am also confused about market positioning. Too expensive to perform daily tasks - open souce models are much cheaper - and not frontier model to address complex real world problems.
Rarely used Sonnet btw.
The graph shows that Opus is cheaper than Sonnet for the same performance. Unless I am suffering a cognitive blindness thing right now.
It would be great to see these charts with the promotional pricing just because it’s here for about two whole months.
I guess I could get Sonnet 5 to do it.
Does anyone else have any review token saving measures?
Assume it to get deprecated sooner rather than later.
I guess it's probably a lot cheaper for them to run, and it cuts costs for them. Seems disingenuous, though.
I have been using Sonnet 4.6 more than Opus, because I'm mostly doing agent-assisted development and not fully agent-driven development. This announcement does not make me positive, I have found that the more models are optimized for fully agentic development, the worse they get at assisted development and often start doing too much despite very strict/specific instructions.
I have been moving more and more to K2.7 Code and GLM-5.2 the last few weeks. They are often good enough for assistance, very fast, and cheap.
Trouble is, everyone inside their buildings seems to believe that no one will be working like that in a year or two.
Offhand, I’m not even certain whether a model like that could justify the constant retraining we’re doing on the agentic models.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend millions or billions on training to reduce hallucinations by 0.3% if your model assumes a human is in the loop to course-correct them.
This source claims that knowledge workers alone (probably because they are paid much more) account for 35 - 50 Trillion of that: https://github.com/danielmiessler/Substrate/blob/main/Data/K...
If LLMs can boost their productivity even by an average of 5% (studies from ~2024 put it in the ~30% range depending on task) that is ~1.5 - 2.5T in value annually. Even if the AI industry can capture a fraction of that, that is a huuuge monetization opportunity.
Note, at 5% productivity boost, humans are not just in the loop, they are the loop. AGI or large-scale replacement of humans is not even needed, but the financial opportunity is already immense, and it scales with how much human productivity can be improved (i.e. how much work can be offloaded to LLMs.)
Now, I don't think AGI will happen soon (or has already happened, depending on how you define it) but I do think humans will be a much smaller part of the loop and large-scale job displacement will happen once companies figure out how to properly use AI.
At this point, the financial upside for the AI industry is extremely high but will be limited by the social turmoil that will inevitably ensue (which we're already seeing brewing in the data center backlash.)
Now, we can't know if this is true unfortunately, but it's not directly contradicted by anything that's known publicly at least. I thought it was an interesting way to frame it and makes the whole situation look marginally less bad.
Unfortunately (from my perspective) it seems like the US companies are increasingly stuck in their current model. I think it's a competitive disadvantage.
But obviously most of the real insiders seem to disagree with me, so I'm probably wrong :)
https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/gemma-4-on-cerebras-the-fastest...
I think there is. Pair today doesn’t mean they’re locked into that forever.
Honestly I still don't see how they justify their valuations, period. If anything they're serious liabilities.
Open-weight models are improving and reaching "good enough" levels for more and more tasks. They're also known quantities; you know what you're getting with them and don't have to worry about the model silently (or not so silently) being switched out from under you (whether that's because Anthropic/OpenAI decides you're not worthy of their latest and greatest for one reason or another, or they switch you to a quantized model to save on compute, or they simply sunset the specific model you've been relying on).
And if the open-weight model doesn't run on your local hardware already, there are any number of hosting providers that will handle that for you (so you're back to just paying for colocation/cloud usage instead of nebulous tokens).
Closed models are improving as well, sure, but diminishing returns will eventually kick in (as they already have for various tasks, as I said).
So if not their models, where does their value come from? Just simple network effects/lock-in? "Normal" users will drift to other options if they start showing more and more ads, and enterprise customers will surely be looking for opportunities to avoid lock-in and reduce risk.
I think the last argument I've heard is that these valuations are basically a bet that Anthropic and/or OpenAI will achieve AGI that can fully replace human labor, so they'll essentially be able to sell that replacement labor to everyone. They haven't managed to pull that off, yet, however. Businesses that have tried to replace humans almost immediately realized either that the AI's capabilities were oversold or that they at least needed a human in the loop still, to some degree. And even if they do achieve AGI, that would surely become an issue of national security (they're already flirting with that today), so who's to say governments won't simply nationalize the best AI labs and either remove them from the economy entirely or perhaps even provide models as a public service to level the playing field?
That all sounds like a giant gamble, if anything. And it's incredibly frustrating to watch as someone that's been unemployed for a year because (a) budgets are being burned on tokens and (b) LLM-generated applications are flooding hiring teams and preventing real people from being seen. (Not to mention, as someone that spends a lot of time in gaming circles, the fact that DRAM and flash storage is quickly becoming inaccessible is just an additional frustration that means people can't even find temporary relief in entertainment.) I can only hope this bubble finally implodes before I lose my house.
I don't know if it's a matter of just requiring a tiny amount of optimization or wholesale redesign.
Today's news that Amazon is hiring 11k interns. I think part of the AI story was used as a convenient excuse to get rid of some "fat" and some covid overhiring and gave companies an out to change course.
For the non-bleeding edge they have a lot of competition with more competitors showing up every day.
The way this is playing out is not surprising, it's similar to any other technological breakthrough as it becomes commercialized. Eventually those means of production will become commoditized as well.
And now in a heavy coding week rather than bumping up against my spend limit by late Wednesday or Thursday I'm comfortably below it all week.
That said if anything I feel like I have to reign in K2.6 much more than Opus, actually. If I want to just ask it a question without it inferring some coding task to immediately start doing, it takes a lot more care to prevent it from just running off half-cocked off of an only 3/4s-cocked idea of my own. I use "plan" mode with both but it's somewhat more defensive with K2.6 than Opus.
I've moved completely to local models that I run with my M1 Mac Studio (64gb ram) some time ago. But for the rare times when I feel the local, quantized Qwen3.6 isn't enough, I just connect to Openrouter and use something like Kimi, GLM or Deepseek for a fraction of the price of Anthropic et al.
https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-OptiQ-4...
Most of my work involves "Agentic engineering" instead of fire-and-forget. I like to stay involved during the planning as well as review and ask a lot more questions from the agent than I've seen others doing. In a way, I'm using the agent in a sort of "hyper auto-complete" mode to fill in the blanks (rather big blanks) once I've set out the requirements, scope and design (sometimes specific module boundaries). This works best for me.
I use Composer (since we use Cursor) or GPT 5.3-codex as my workhorse models and only break out the big guns when I have a genuinely difficult problem to solve.
IMO somewhat weirdly 5.3-codex might be the best overall coding model OpenAI have ever released. It's 90% as good as 5.5 and costs about 20% as much, since it's both cheaper per token and uses fewer tokens for the same task.
I'll miss it when they inevitably deprecate it, but hopefully I can use Kimi K2.7 by then
OpenAI claims to have made their new Terra model as good as GPT 5.5, but with half the cost per intelligence. Hopefully, this will bring it closer to the price you're expecting (or even better considering GPT models have good acceptance/success rates according to benchmarks).
There are so many models, and I personally ignore benchmarks so it takes some time to try different models on my use cases. Fortunately, it is ‘good enough’ to do the work to find a few models that work for me, and just use them for a month or two before re-investing time for my own evals to possibly change models.
People should evaluate what works for them and ignore other people and benchmarks. (Apologies if that sounds snarky.)
I ask “where did you get that?” … too often if I’m not constantly guiding it, and even then it still goes off the rails.
the incentives aren't there sadly
I can't help but feel this is intentional towards the 'Agentic' workflow.
For the 'safety' argument (Re: Fable), they need these models to have basically a 2-tier instruction system, but given LLMs aren't great with actual Logic unless they program it out to test, this runs afoul and we get one or the other.
Feels like optimizing for either precision or recall, but can't have both
If you set off a classifier, that's how it looks to Claude.
IMO, they were quite good with checklists even a year ago, and tried to tick off each one.
Fable was amazing as a vibecoder but as an assistant it can't resist jumping into implementation and filling chats of pointless jargon.
It's really grim if you're looking for assistance instead of an implementor.
GPT 5.5 Pro and Fable are gorgeous bullshitters that pretend to be right (often convincingly because they are very smart) even when they are wrong and I need tons of energy to process their information.
I don't like it but don't know what to do, Anthropic models especially increasingly ignore instructions whether in memory or agents files.
The problem is obviously who will be left. There’s a lot of scifi to catch up on.
I recently migrated a very large web app to Tailwind and Opus kept screwing up over and over, refactoring and changing the design, the more complex the component became.
I ended up asking Haiku to do it and it managed to do everything correctly, pretty much without intervention.
I've taken to instructing the agent to manage the subagent, and the principal agent's sole job is to ensuring the subagent follows instructions to the letter.
"I just cloned this repo, investigate how to set it up, don't install anything, just collect information"
_spews information_
I proceed with the setup, but get a Linux specific dependency in a bash script, so I want to evaluate whether it can be rewritten...
"There's this error on MacOS, I think it's because we need linux-utils from brew, verify whether the script can be written in bare posix"
_proceeds installing linux-utils and all the rest_
"Didn't I tell you to not install anything?"
_you're absolutely right_
F*k me..
Sonnet as an autonomous agentic model is silly. We already have other models for that if you want something weaker and cheaper than Opus.
Only thing I can think of is for when someone is out of opus credits. Of course there are API billing use cases but I'd probably still just use opus on low.
I think the models are being optimized for wealth extraction from users and companies, instead of solving problems.
I don't know why Opus would try to create an entire library when I told it specifically to do something simple that would take 2-3 lines of Python.
Yeah, that’s my thoughts as well. I feel it’s great for benchmarks and some tasks while in other it tries to spend as much tokens as possible, tries to overcomplicate task and needs seconds or third round of steering that costs. With the scale Anthropic operates I bet it’s huge amount of extra money just to make sure their model works.
Because it reasons in one direction. First it encounters some kind of issue with 2-3 lines of Python that might make it not work, and then it goes onto plan B, which is making a library, but it doesn't circle back and compare the effort of making the library to working around whatever might make the 2-3 lines not work. Except sometimes it does, because it's inscrutable.
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-5-system-card
From the system card: "On CyberGym vulnerability discovery, Claude Sonnet 5 is less capable than Sonnet 4.6, and far less capable than Opus 4.8 and Mythos 5
As with the other evaluations in this section, these results were achieved with all safeguards turned off. When run with our default mitigations, Sonnet 5 scored a 0 on CyberGym"
Similar situation was with planning and coding. GLM-5.2 seems to be good “on paper” but the real usage results was different.
And I am not an attorney for Claude or GLM-5.2… :)
But as I’ve been using LLM models daily since Nov 2022 I have realized that all common tests have to be confirmed in your project - there is no “one model rules them all” - you need to dig out a specific model from that LLM haystack with thousands of models.
Benchmarks help but they start to be similar to fuel consumption specs in car ads - real consumption is different for everybody :)
"Wow, X models is Y% better or worse than Claude Z model on T benchmark"
"That's irrelevant, they're just benchmaxing."
"Not useable for daily coding or agentic workloads, the vibes are totally wrong."
"It's almost as good, and costs a lot less, so I will absolutely use it."
"I cannot imagine justifying using these, as the step change means open models lower costs do not make up for the productivity loss"
I'm an unhappy Anthropic customer and really rooting for open models and non-gatekept intelligence, but how do we move on from this now meme-like model release discourse rigamarole. I do not know what that would be. I don't design LLMs nor benchmarks, and I genuinely appreciate that people do their best to provide information, even if non-perfect here. I'm sure most of you who actively read these comment pages on announcements must feel similarly, though, right?
I generally agree with this in spirit https://www.seangoedecke.com/are-new-models-good/ , but I think you can read Anthropic's results showing Sonnet 5 as almost strictly worse than Opus 4.8 as very credible/meaningful, and then draw comparisons from that
20 minutes after the announcement there's no real useful statement that can be made about it.
This may be the goal.
I've been using Sonnet instead of Opus for almost all coding tasks for a while now. A little elbow grease to break down tasks and you can spend a lot less money for just about the same output quality.
There was a fairly major regression in Claude Code performance for some time when they changed the system prompt to try and make it less verbose (saving tokens). And if I'm not misremembering, there were a lot of complaints when they changed the default effort from high to medium.
Why would they brag about something like this? It's like they know people want to use models to perform cybersecurity tasks yet knowingly deny them the ability.
And Opus 4.8 is still cheaper for a higher pass rate (much less open weight models like GLM 5.2) so not sure why I'd use Sonnet except on the low effort level for I suppose trivial tasks where I want it to work only 50% of the time judging by the graph. The pricing doesn't really make any sense.
It’s like telling a chef to cook without a knife because knives can kill people.
Dario and his lackeys at Anthropic aren’t visionaries.
I'm sure they're well-aware that this also will make it worse at building secure systems, but the gov't isn't restricting releases based on that.
Fable is effectively not available to the general public in the US either
>Our safety assessments found that Sonnet 5 shows an overall lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6, and is generally safer to use in agentic contexts.
which is obviously painting that as a good thing. So reading the next sentence as "in other good news" is reasonable.
Also, I wouldn’t expect Mythos-class models to be allowed to be openly released by the CCP. Thinking otherwise is pure naivety.
I supposed I shouldn't be surprised at how the trump admin is approaching AI regulation, counter-productive is really all they do
Gemini wouldn't do a security audit. But it came up with a great set of mitigations and identified an extant XSS flaw in the process of improving robustness.
There's an awful lot of good that can come from proactive, defensive use of LLMs. I realize there's also a lot of pain when the difficulty of exploit finding drops suddenly, but in the long term we may all benefit from the defensive side of this.
This recent government interference is about trying to preserve US offensive cyberwarfare and cyberespionage capabilities. It’s not about “bad actors”. It’s about defensive capabilities becoming pervasive and cheap, which would kneecap us cyberoffensive capability.
It’s like making seatbelts illegal so that police chases can be more effective.
What exactly do you want Anthropic to say here? "This model, the one we are about to give to the entire world for cheap, is really good at hacking"? Saying Sonnet is terrible at cybersecurity is the most reasonable thing they can say, out of a lot of bad options.
Unless it spams as much as Opus, I doubt it. Opus 4.8 literally spams text like puke. On a longer run especially if you get cache misses here and there the bulk of the cost is all the extra context it adds.
In effect, high reasoning only makes sense when you're using the frontier model and need extra performance (higher levels of reasoning are never pareto optimal unless you're at the largest model size).
At least for Claude family models.
e.g. {
}I'm sure native reasoning produces more accurate results, but for my use case the quality was about the same, and the model would reason for thousands of tokens in native reasoning vs just 1-200 with response level reasoning.
Again, to be clear, this is for deterministic/pipeline style workflows, not agentic/coding use.
I don't know whether that comes out ahead compared to just staying with the better model in the first place.
I'm sure folks' mileage will vary though.
This line as a selling point is also pretty funny:
> Evaluations also show that it has a much lower ability to perform cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models.
I also like that the difference between low, medium, high, xhigh seems more spread, which is actually a good thing for people trying to tune applications. Running Sonnet 5 on low with the launch pricing makes this potentially a better fit than Haiku or open source models for some tasks. I don't think it will make sense at full price.
I struggle to understand where this model fits in. If I need a cheap model for simple stuff (like, summarizing an email); I'd go Haiku (actually, I'd go Deepseek v4 Flash, but you catch my drift). I just can't think of many tasks where I'm like "yeah let me reach for Sonnet Low Reasoning so I can save a dollar but also seriously run the risk of it failing"; I'd just reach for Opus Low.
Low and maybe medium will save money on simpler tasks, but after that it just isn’t worth it compared to Opus.
I wish they would have explained in the blog post why they think anybody would ever want to use this above medium.
Maybe it works well on things that aren’t clear in the benchmarks.
In that, it seems sonnet 5 on high costs more than opus 4.8 at a lower pass rate. Am I reading this correctly?
Edit: It looks like the key value proposition of the updated model is that it is much better than Sonnet 4.6.
Wheras, Sonnet 5 delivers great value (by browsercomp benchmarks and compared to opus) when running in low and medium.
So: Sonnet 4.6 should ~never have been run for low, medium or high when Opus 4.8 has been available. Whoops, I think I have some skills that delegate easy stuff to Sonnet.
---
I remember Anthropic pivoting everyone's default model to Opus but had not seen it put so starkly before.
I am a bit confused on the subscription `/usage` screen. It splits out sonnet usage, and I'd presumed that would have contributed to a lower use of subscription Quota.
But if this is correct, Sonnet usage was basically like smoking unfiltered cigarettes.
Sort of like, getting an automatic upgrade at a car rental or hotel if there is availability.
But isn’t Fable supposed to be another step change? I never used it, myself.
Tbh, at this point I think top tier models are smart “enough” (I’m sure this will look antiquated in a year), and the way to give me MORE noticeable improvement is to make them much faster rather than much smarter. Or even a way to automatically and accurately pick faster models when it makes sense. I know that IDE’s have Auto modes, but it’s not something that I trust right now to pick smart+fast instead of picking “maybe smart enough”+”cheaper for harness owner”
In other words, for certain tasks, Opus 4.8 is cheaper than Sonnet 5, and does better than Sonnet 5.
I've noticed this pattern on a lot of benchmarks. You can try to emulate a bigger model by ramping up the test time compute (max reasoning, more turns, model fusion etc.), but you can't reach the same quality level, and you often exceed the cost you would have paid by just using a bigger model.
tldr: if you're doing something hard, just use a bigger model.
or
The Dodge Charger is built to be the most Charger like car yet.
"Sonnet 5 is an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, but it uses an updated tokenizer that changes how the model processes text to improve performance (this is similar to the tokenizer change we introduced with Claude Opus 4.7). The tradeoff is that the same input can map to more tokens: roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. The introductory pricing is set so that the transition to Sonnet 5 is roughly cost-neutral."
If we trust them, then it is roughly the same as sonnet 4.6
Today sonnet 5's med level effort is equivalent to sonnet 4.6 low level effort :/
Unfortunately that means I won't be using it at work for now.
[0] https://github.com/dginovker/BFME-Source-Code/
It seems being incompetent is a feature now...
"They took my shit away!" -- 3-day Fable 5 addicts (me)
"How dare they tell Trump no?" -- US nationalist / "my country right or wrong" types
"Great to see a closed source company fail!" -- open source boosters
"Great to see an American company fail!" -- anti-US, and/or pro-China folks
"Great to see a successful company fail!" -- anti-capitalists and/or sour-grapes crab bucket types
"Serves you right for ripping off creators!" -- copyright warriors
"They keep silently nerfing the models!" -- secret downgrade conspiracy theorists
"Quit killing the planet!" -- anti-datacenter advocates
Which is a bit of a bummer considering they do genuinely make the best model that's most pleasant to work with in my opinion.
I don't agree with your framing that all negativity is from crazies
cool to see, still waiting for models to get better at computer use.
Claude Code generates more revenue than OpenAI...It appears to be a nice meme.
Bro that is financial engineering, not real revenue growth. They engineered the switch to usage based pricing and a price hike timed the quarter before they wanted to go public, long enough to juice their numbers but not long enough for them not to be able to manage backlash and have to walk things back. Then they tried to extrapolate that manufactured bump to make it look like they have record shattering revenue growth.
Based upon the "Agentic Computer usage", Sonnet 5 Max was going to be off "Agentic Search results" chart. lol ...
In short, Sonnet 5 Low/Medium is more cost efficient, if its a task below Opus 4.8 Medium. For the rest its expensive and your better off using Opus 4.8.
Why even release this model?
You are reading too much into the graph and ignoring the threshold of usefulness for real world tasks. By that logic Sonnet 4.5 would have never been worth using.
For the rest the gap in pricing vs efficiency is so small, that there is no point in using Sonnet. I am looking at their own cost comparisons vs efficiency...
I use Haiku a lot for agent workflows, if I can get better output at similar prices, Sonnet 5 will replace it completely.
None of the other labs are doing this kind of long lived two model series.
- Do the ever increasing scores on the mean we will soon have models that approach 100%? And what would that even mean? That there is no more room for improvement?
- Would Anthropic (or any other model vendor for that matter) ever release a newer model that scores lower? If not, does that mean they keep tweaking a new model they want to release until it shows an improvement of the prior model?
- Would it be more useful to move toward a comparative rather than absolute ranking?
And yet, the $2-$5 section is the widest, even though it only contains a single point.
I can't even say if this is making the product look better or not, but it sure is weird. Maybe Claude just hallucinated those splits xD
Okay.
I'd generously assume this is something about the specific category of agentic task presented in the chart... but it does raise the question "then why is that category the one they chose to highlight here".
Agentic search is a different story, but even there it still dominates 4.6 (as in, for everything Sonnet 4.6 can do, Sonnet 5 can do it as well or better at the same or lower cost).
Yes, Opus 4.8 dominates Sonnet 5 over its entire range in both categories, but Opus's lower range is limited and there is a valid regime on the lower end where Sonnet 5 use makes economic sense. This is not the case for Sonnet 4.6 where Opus 4.8 dominates it completely on both charts.
Edit -- reading your response closer I think we're saying the same things, maybe just disagreeing on whether that lower end is valuable or not.