Claude Sonnet 5 is Anthropic’s latest medium-tier model and replaces Sonnet 4.6. It pushes quality close to Opus while keeping Sonnet’s lower per-token price. It supports thinking mode and context windows up to 1M tokens, making it a strong default for everyday coding when you want frontier reasoning without Opus pricing.

Strengths

  • Near-Opus quality. Sonnet 5 closes most of the gap to Opus 5 on real coding work while staying far cheaper per token.
  • Strong reasoning. Thinking mode handles multi-step tasks, planning, and debugging with depth.
  • Reliable tool use. It calls tools purposefully and chains results into follow-up actions.
  • Same provider and style as Opus at a lower price point.

Limitations

  • For peak quality on the hardest tasks, Opus 5 remains the stronger choice.
  • The updated tokenizer maps the same input to more tokens, so token counts run higher than older Sonnet models.

Tools

Sonnet 5 has access to all agent tools when used with Cursor including:

Learn more about how tools work and tool calling fundamentals.

Pricing

Cursor plans include two usage pools. Sonnet 5 draws from the third-party Other Models pool, which charges at the rates below. All prices are per million tokens.

All Sonnet 5 prompts bill at the base per-token rates in the table above, including when context goes above 200k. There is no separate long-context multiplier for Sonnet 5.

A thinking variant is available for deeper reasoning.