Claude Opus 5 vs Claude Sonnet 5: pricing, Quality, Value, and benchmarks

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Pricing, app access, and Conversation Value

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  52.6%

  Artificial Analysis Claude Opus 5 evaluation | Independent text-only HLE evaluation using adaptive reasoning at maximum effort over the 2,158-question set.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Normalized quality input

  79.2%

  Anthropic Claude Opus 5 system card | Vendor-reported SWE-Bench Pro result using adaptive thinking at maximum effort, default sampling settings, averaged over five trials.

• Terminal-Bench 2.1

  Agentic terminal task completion

  89.0%

  Artificial Analysis Claude Opus 5 analysis | Independent Terminal-Bench 2.1 result for Claude Opus 5 at maximum effort.

• GPQA Diamond

  Normalized quality input

  93.2%

Anthropic's Opus successor pairs frontier reasoning and coding results with premium $5/$25 token pricing.

Claude Opus 5 combines a 1M-token context window with strong exact-variant HLE and SWE-Bench Pro results. Its $5 per million input-token and $25 per million output-token prices keep it in the premium tier, so it is best reserved for work where capability matters more than unit cost.

Ship Claude Sonnet 5 as the default Sonnet upgrade for production coding, agentic, and long-context workloads; budget for the September price step-up and reserve Opus for tasks that justify the higher tier.

Claude Sonnet 5 is the right default Sonnet model for most production teams that want stronger coding, agentic, and multi-step performance without moving every workload to Opus. It replaces Sonnet 4.6 in the current Claude lineup, carries stronger accepted-source HLE and SWE-Bench Pro evidence, and adds a 1M token context window that materially improves RAG, repository-scale coding, and document-heavy workflows. The migration still deserves an engineering review: the public row uses Anthropic vendor-reported benchmark evidence, the introductory API price ends after August 31, 2026, and plan-level availability or limits can vary by Claude surface. Treat it as the new default, test your real prompts and retrieval payloads, and route to Opus only when the task genuinely needs the higher-cost tier.