Anthropic holds the Sonnet 5 price increase
Why I called it
The cleanest natural experiment available on frontier pricing power. If a lab can raise the price of its workhorse model and hold it, the race-to-zero story is wrong, and every model of this industry's margins needs redoing.
What happened
Anthropic canceled the September 1st increase before it took effect: on August 10th it made the $2/$10 per million token introductory price permanent, and its pricing docs now state the scheduled increase to $3/$15 'will not occur'. List pricing below $3/$15 before November 30th resolves this wrong. The desk missed the announcement for three weeks; the resolution is dated when we caught it, not when it happened.
The call, in full. Anthropic does not reverse or re-discount the Claude Sonnet 5 price increase within 90 days of it taking effect on September 1st 2026.
Scoring criterion. RESOLVES WRONG if list pricing for Sonnet 5 drops below $3/$15 per million tokens, or a broad promotional discount restoring pre-September economics is announced, before 30 Nov 2026. Targeted enterprise discounts do not count.
The criterion is the machine-checkable version: a prediction that cannot be settled by a third party against a public source fails the build before it reaches this page.
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