Anthropic cancels Sonnet 5 price hike, Claude Code Auto Mode becomes default on Pro/Max/Team
On August 14, Anthropic made Claude Sonnet 5's introductory $2 input / $10 output pricing permanent, canceling the September 1 hike to $3/$15. Claude Code Auto Mode also became default on Pro, Max, and Team plans, with the classifier blocking 89 percent of dangerous commands in controlled testing.
On August 14, Anthropic announced a series of product and pricing updates. The most consequential was making Claude Sonnet 5's introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens the permanent standard, canceling the scheduled September 1 increase to $3/$15. The 50 percent bill hike that FinOps teams had been modeling for migration planning is now off the table. Sonnet 5 stays the cheap workhorse for high-volume production traffic, while Opus 5 at $5/$25 remains reserved for long-running agentic work that needs its 1M-token context.
The same day, Anthropic made Claude Code Auto Mode the default for new sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans. The per-tool approval prompt is gone, replaced by a classifier that evaluates each tool call and blocks anything irreversible, destructive, or out of bounds. In a controlled study of 1,053 paid testers, Auto Mode blocked 89 percent of dangerous commands versus 13.6 percent for humans manually approving each prompt; third-party red-teaming pushed the classifier miss rate from 12 percent down to 7 percent. Teams running Auto Mode also shipped roughly 25 percent more pull requests. Auto Mode stays opt-in on Enterprise, the Claude API, Bedrock, Google Cloud's Agent Platform, and Microsoft Foundry.
Anthropic also upgraded Claude Tag, the Claude-in-Slack teammate, to draw on full channel context, memory, and standing instructions when deciding whether to chime in or stay silent. Accuracy improved by about 30 percent, and proactive replies are now free. Self-Hosted Claude Code Environments entered public beta on Team and Enterprise, letting sessions run on the customer's own servers. The Compliance API also expanded to cover Cowork sessions on desktop, web, and mobile, plus Claude Code on CLI and desktop, in beta for Claude Enterprise customers.