Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.8, and the pricing story is unusually clean: the regular Claude API rate did not change.
Standard Claude Opus 4.8 pricing:
- Input: $5.00 per 1M tokens
- Cached input: $0.50 per 1M tokens
- Output: $25.00 per 1M tokens
- Batch input: $2.50 per 1M tokens
- Batch output: $12.50 per 1M tokens
The bigger economic change is fast mode.
| Fast mode | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| Opus 4.6 / 4.7 | $30.00 / 1M | $150.00 / 1M |
| Opus 4.8 | $10.00 / 1M | $50.00 / 1M |
That is still a 2x premium over standard Opus 4.8 pricing, but it is no longer a 6x premium. For coding agents, browser agents, research assistants, and latency-sensitive tools, that changes the test case.
My read: keep Sonnet 4.6 or cheaper OpenAI/Google models for bulk work. Use Opus 4.8 where better reasoning, fewer retries, or faster completion directly affects the outcome.
Full breakdown with budget examples:
https://www.aipricing.guru/news/claude-opus-4-8-pricing-fast-mode-may-2026/
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