Anthropic Touts Claude Sonnet 5 as a Lower-Cost Alternative to Opus for Agentic Work, Releases Free Building Workshop

Anthropic is positioning its newest model, Claude Sonnet 5, as a far cheaper way to run autonomous AI agents, with one of the company's engineers saying the model handled agent work that previously required the pricier Opus tier for roughly $20 instead of $90. The claim, tied to a freshly released roughly one-hour workshop on building production-grade agents, has sharpened attention on the cost-versus-performance tradeoffs that increasingly define enterprise AI adoption.