Claude Sonnet 5 closes gap to Opus 4.8 on coding benchmarks

Independent benchmarks show Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 approaching Opus 4.8's agentic coding performance while priced at Sonnet's lower token rate. The comparison also covers Sonnet 4.6, highlighting a shifting cost-performance tradeoff for developers choosing between Anthropic's models.

Why it matters: Developers can get near-Opus coding performance at Sonnet pricing, changing model-selection tradeoffs.