Sonnet 5 cost MORE than Opus 4.8 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
LisanBench creator @scaling01 says Claude Sonnet 5 is twice as expensive as GPT-5.5 and 57 times pricier than DeepSeek-V4-Pro
Story Overview
A chart circulating on X from Artificial Analysis shows Claude Sonnet 5 (max) landing at the high end of cost per Intelligence Index task, with the LisanBench creator highlighting its position relative to GPT-5.5 and DeepSeek V4-Pro on the same benchmark.
How the numbers break down across token types
The stacked bars separate answer, reasoning, cache write, cache hit, and input costs, revealing where Sonnet 5 pulls ahead of Opus 4.8 and other listed models under the weighted average method.
What remains unclear without workload details
Exact totals depend on caching behavior and task mix, so real-world spend could shift from the reported per-task figures shown in the June 30 snapshot.
Many users criticized Claude Sonnet 5 for costing more than Opus 4.8 despite lower performance on intelligence benchmarks, calling the pricing a scam or poor value.
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Most Activity
Price per token != cost per task
Sonnet 5 goes straight into the garbage bin
> 1.2x more expensive than Opus 4.8 Max > 2x more expensive than GPT-5.5-xhigh > 5x more expensive than GLM-5.2 > 7x more expensive than Kimi-K2.6 > 57x more expensive than DeepSeek-V4-Pro
Oh my god, Sonnet 5 was MORE EXPENSIVE THAN FABLE to run the whole bench 💀
Sonnet 5 cost MORE than Opus 4.8 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

@theo It hasn’t been done voluntarily but they can un-launch a model
Sonnet 5 goes straight into the garbage bin
> 1.2x more expensive than Opus 4.8 Max > 2x more expensive than GPT-5.5-xhigh > 5x more expensive than GLM-5.2 > 7x more expensive than Kimi-K2.6 > 57x more expensive than DeepSeek-V4-Pro
How is this possible? Efficiency. It generates almost 2x as many tokens as Opus 4.8 per task.
Sonnet 5 cost MORE than Opus 4.8 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
stop scamming us with those shitty 500B yapper models
I WILL NOT SHUT UP AS LONG AS SONNET 5 IS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN OPUS WHILE DOING LESS
Sonnet 5 goes straight into the garbage bin
> 1.2x more expensive than Opus 4.8 Max > 2x more expensive than GPT-5.5-xhigh > 5x more expensive than GLM-5.2 > 7x more expensive than Kimi-K2.6 > 57x more expensive than DeepSeek-V4-Pro
It gets worse
Oh my god, Sonnet 5 was MORE EXPENSIVE THAN FABLE to run the whole bench 💀

@mweinbach lmao

@f4micom omfg

@theo Only Anthropic would be able to achieve this. Launch a next generation, smaller, weaker, cheaper model, that is also more expensive.
At least we don't have fable 5 to compare it to, it would be funny if it was also cheaper then sonnet 5.

@theo At least we got something from Fable back even if it's just the price

difficult to understand

@theo This too. Gloating over 0 on CuberGym

@theo They gotta be doing this on purpose

@theo Is sonnet 5 just mythos in a trench coat?

@scaling01 all Anthropic models are very token thinking heavy compared to GPT.. check out http://matharena.ai too. Fable uses so much more than Gemini 3.1 & GPT-5.5

@theo Still working on some better graphs but basically we got a worse Opus 4.7 with this release...

@theo Seems like a weird release, not really understanding the logic

@theo But... you just told another user that Sonnet 5 was a better choice against GLM 5.2 due to it managing tokens better?
So, this is a take-backsies moment?

@mweinbach @theo ouch