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.

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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.

"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?

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I guess it's probably a lot cheaper for them to run, and it cuts costs for them. Seems disingenuous, though.

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.

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.

- 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

However, I am also confused for the 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.

Expect it to get deprecated sooner rather than later.

I can't help but feel this is intentional towards the 'Agentic' workflow.

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.

Trouble is, everyone inside their buildings seems to believe that no one will be working like that in a year or two.

the incentives aren't there sadly

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.

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.

This may be the goal.

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.

"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