Ad
Skip to content

Anthropic drops the surcharge for million-token context windows, making Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 far cheaper

Anthropic is making Claude's extra-large context window a lot cheaper. The Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 models now offer a context window of one million tokens at the standard price. Until now, Anthropic charged a surcharge of up to 100 percent for requests exceeding 200,000 tokens. The context window determines how much text an AI model can process in a single request.

Opus 4.6 still costs $5/$25 per million tokens (input/output), and Sonnet 4.6 runs $3/$15. But whether a prompt contains 9,000 or 900,000 tokens no longer matters for pricing. On top of that, the media limit jumps from 100 to 600 images or PDF pages per request. The new pricing applies to Claude Code (Max, Team, and Enterprise) and is available through Amazon Bedrock (except for the media limit), Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.

The GraphWalks BFS benchmark measures how well AI models handle logical reasoning across large amounts of text. Opus 4.6 reportedly shows almost no drop in performance even at full context length. | Image: Anthropic

According to Anthropic, both models achieve the highest accuracy among comparable models at full context length in benchmark tests. That said, the broader problem of declining precision as context windows fill up is still far from solved.

AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans

Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section.

Read on for the full picture.
Subscribe for hype-free coverage.

  • Full access to every article on THE DECODER
  • No ads
  • Join the comments and community discussions
  • A weekly AI news recap via mail
  • 6x/year: "AI Radar" — deep dives on the AI topics that matter most
  • Daily AI news, always up to date
  • Our full ten-year archive
  • Covered by a team with 10+ years in AI
Subscribe to The Decoder