Anthropic Responds to OpenAI's Price Cut: Claude 5 API Also Gets 35% Price Reduction Today
Anthropic announced a 35% price cut for Claude 5 Sonnet API pricing effective today, April 2, 2026 — hours after OpenAI's 40% cut. Claude 5 Sonnet input now at $1.80/million tokens, output at $7.50/million.
In what is becoming the fastest-moving pricing war in AI history, Anthropic responded to OpenAI's morning announcement with its own price reduction for Claude 5 Sonnet API — effective immediately as of this afternoon, April 2, 2026. The move confirms what many analysts suspected: OpenAI's 40% cut this morning was designed to pressure Anthropic's growing enterprise API business.
New Claude 5 Pricing — Effective Today, April 2, 2026
| Model | Input (old) | Input (new) | Output (old) | Output (new) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude 5 Haiku | $0.80 | $0.60 | $4.00 | $3.00 |
| Claude 5 Sonnet | $3.00 | $1.80 | $15.00 | $7.50 |
| Claude 5 Opus | $15.00 | $12.00 | $75.00 | $60.00 |
Prices per million tokens. Effective April 2, 2026.
Anthropic's Statement Today
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a post on X today: "We've been working on efficiency improvements for months. Today's pricing reflects our continued investment in making Claude accessible to more developers and businesses at every scale. Our commitment to safety and honesty remains unchanged regardless of competitive dynamics."
"This is a genuinely good day for developers. Two of the world's best AI models just got 35–40% cheaper simultaneously. The real winner today is every startup and enterprise that pays API bills." — Y Combinator Partner post, April 2, 2026
What This Means for Developers Today
For high-volume API customers, today's price cuts translate directly to significant savings. A startup spending $10,000/month on Claude 5 Sonnet API calls will now pay approximately $6,500 — saving $3,500/month without changing a single line of code. New pricing is already live in the Anthropic Console billing dashboard as of this afternoon.
Claude 5 Pro consumer subscriptions ($20/month) are unchanged by today's announcement — the price cuts apply only to API (developer/enterprise) usage.