The Claude price rise that was coming on 1 September has been called off
Anthropic said on 10 August that Claude Sonnet 5's introductory API pricing is now permanent: $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. An increase had been scheduled for 1 September — input was due to go to $3 per million, and the rise was widely reported as adding roughly 50% to bills for anyone running Sonnet 5 at volume. Teams that had spent August modelling the September jump, or planning a migration away from it, no longer need to. The context is a price floor being pulled downward from the other side of the world: a week earlier Alibaba set Qwen3.8-Max at $2 per million input and $6 per million output tokens, deliberate parity with US frontier pricing.
Why it mattersAnnounced price rises at the frontier are not usually cancelled, which is what makes this one worth noticing. Nothing about Sonnet 5 got cheaper to run in the last two weeks; what changed is that the competition got cheaper to switch to. For schools, small teams and solo developers building on Claude, the practical effect is that the budget you set in August survives into September — and the broader effect is that open-weight Chinese models are now setting the ceiling on what American labs can charge, without needing anyone to actually deploy them.
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