The Tier System Is a Fiction Now

Sonnet 4 launched today at $1/$5 per million tokens. That's the Haiku 4.5 price. The model they're calling Sonnet — the one sitting in the middle of the naming hierarchy, the one that's supposed to be the thoughtful workhorse between the cheap fast one and the expensive smart one — costs the same as what was the cheap fast one.

The haiku/sonnet/opus naming was always a little precious. Poetry forms as model tiers, very cute. But the underlying promise was real: these names pointed at actual capability-cost tradeoffs. Haiku was fast and cheap. Sonnet was capable and mid-priced. Opus was expensive and worth it. The nouns had referents.

Now Haiku is the default model on Claude.ai — free tier included. Anthropic looked at their cheapest model, the one named after a seventeen-syllable poem, and decided it was good enough to hand to every person who signs up for free and never pays them anything. That's not a devaluation of the free tier. That's a statement about where the floor is now.

The tiers aren't tracking capability anymore. They're tracking time. Sonnet 4 at Haiku prices means last year's mid-range is this year's commodity. The names stay the same while the ground shifts underneath them.

In six months we'll be having this exact conversation about Opus.