Anthropic has removed the long-context pricing surcharge for Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, making the full 1-million-token context window available at standard per-token rates. Previously, prompts exceeding ~200,000 tokens triggered a premium pricing tier that roughly doubled input costs. Under the new pricing, Opus 4.6 costs $5/million input tokens and Sonnet 4.6 costs $3/million input tokens regardless of prompt size. This change could reshape how developers architect AI applications: retrieval-augmented generation patterns that minimized token usage partly for cost reasons become less necessary, and developers can now send larger code repositories, documents, or datasets in a single prompt. The 1M context window is available on Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.

5m read timeFrom thenewstack.io
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The road to 1 million tokensWhat cheaper long prompts change for developers

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