This is the biggest news of the announcement. Prior Opus models were strong, but the cost was a big limiter of usage. This price point still makes it a "premium" option, but isn't prohibitive.

Also increasingly it's becoming important to look at token usage rather than just token cost. They say Opus 4.5 (with high reasoning) used 50% fewer tokens than Sonnet 4.5. So you get a higher score on SWE-bench verified, you pay more per token, but you use fewer tokens and overall pay less!

> Pricing is now $5/$25 per million tokens

For anyone else confused, it's input/output tokens

$5 for 1million tokens in $25 for 1million tokens out

What prevents these jokers from making their outputs ludicrously verbose to squeeze more out of you, given they charge 5x more for the end that they control? Already model outputs are overly verbose, and I can see this getting worse as they try to squeeze some margin. Especially given that many of the tools conveniently hide most of the output.

You would stop using their model and move to their competitors, presumably.

Thanks, updated to make more clear