Anthropic shipped three major updates on Monday: Claude Sonnet 5 became the new default model for Free and Pro users, Claude Science launched as a research workbench for scientists, and the US Commerce Department lifted export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5.
Sonnet 5 is priced aggressively at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, positioning it as a cheaper workhorse for coding, research, and long-running agentic tasks. Anthropic says the model outperforms Claude 4.5 Sonnet across the board while costing less to run.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick confirmed the department worked with Anthropic over the past two weeks to review the restricted models. "The export controls on Fable 5 and Mythos 5 have been lifted," Anthropic announced, with Fable 5 returning to availability on July 1.
Claude Science, now in beta, gives researchers a workbench that traces outputs back to their generating code, manages compute environments on demand, and connects to more than 60 scientific databases spanning biology, chemistry, and related fields. It is Anthropic's most direct attempt yet to build tooling for the scientific community rather than just the developer one.
Analysis
The Sonnet 5 pricing tells the real story. At $2/$10 per million tokens, Anthropic is undercutting its own premium tier to capture volume — the same playbook OpenAI used with GPT-4o. Claude Science is the more interesting move: it positions Anthropic as a research infrastructure company, not just a model vendor. The Fable 5 clearance matters too, but less than it appears. The export ban lasted barely three weeks, and the speed of the reversal suggests the initial suspension was more about establishing jurisdiction than genuine security concern.
