As shipping agentic capabilities becomes table stakes among foundation model companies, Anthropic is releasing Claude Sonnet 5, a more powerful and agentic version of the lab’s midsize model. 

“It can make plans, use tools like browsers and terminals, and run autonomously at a level that, just a few months ago, required larger and more expensive models,” Anthropic said in a blog post. 

That framing mirrors what OpenAI and Google have said about their own recent releases. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol was launched in preview last week, and it is also the firm’s most agentic model yet, allowing users to split work across subagents for longer autonomous tasks. Google’s Gemini 3.5 Flash, which launched in May, was pitched as a shift from a conversational chatbot to an agentic tool that plans, builds, and iterates on real work with minimal human input.

Sonnet 5’s pitch is confirmation that agentic capability is the new baseline expectation at every price tier. Now the differentiator isn’t going to be who can do agentic work best, but how cheaply they can do it and how reliably without human oversight.  

Sonnet 5 promises performance close to that of Opus 4.8, but for much lower costs. Starting Tuesday, Claude Sonnet 5 will be the default model for free and Pro plans, and is available for every subscription.

At launch, Sonnet 5 is priced at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens through August 31, after which the price will jump to $3 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. That makes Sonnet 5 cheaper than Opus 4.8, as well as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. (It’s still more expensive than Gemini 3.5 Flash.)

The new model also demonstrates significant improvements over its predecessor Sonnet 4.6, released in February, on agentic performance like reasoning, tool use, software coding, and knowledge work, according to Anthropic. 

For example, on one benchmark, Sonnet 5 scores a 63.2% on agentic coding, compared to Opus 4.8’s 69.2% and Sonnet 4.6’s 58.1%. On a knowledge work benchmark, Sonnet 5 actually slightly outperforms Opus 4.8, which is known for winning on solving the hardest problems like making subtle judgement calls and deep research. 

“Opus 4.8 is still the model of choice for higher accuracy on these tasks, but Sonnet 5 provides developers with lower-priced options that are of much higher quality than what was previously available,” Anthropic says. “Between Sonnet 5 and Opus 4.8, users can adjust the effort level to find the right balance of cost and performance.”

According to testers cited in the blog post, Sonnet 5 also excels at finishing complex tasks where previous model versions would have stopped short and “checks its own output without explicitly being asked.”

“We handed Claude Sonnet 5 a two-part job—update Salesforce account tiers, send a launch announcement to enterprise contacts—and it finished end to end,” Daniel Shepard, a senior engineer at Zapier, said in a statement. “That used to stall halfway. For day-to-day automation, it’s a no-brainer. ”

On safety, Sonnet 5 also demonstrates a lower rate of “undesirable behaviors” like cooperation with misuse and deception than its predecessor, making it safer to use in agentic contexts. It’s better at refusing malicious requests and sidestepping hijack attempts in prompt injection attacks. It also hallucinates and engages in sycophantic behavior at a lower rate than Sonet 4.6.

That said, it’s not on the same level as Opus 4.8 and Claude Mythos Preview when it comes to misaligned behavior. “Evaluations also show that it has a much lower ability to perform dangerous cybersecurity tasks than our current Opus models,” reads the blog post.

Lovable co-founder Fabian Hedin said in a statement that Claude Sonnet 5 “refuses unsafe requests cleanly and consistently.”

“At Lovable, we’re putting powerful tools in the hands of millions of builders,” Hedin said. “A model that knows when to say no is just as important as one that knows how to build.”

A new startup wants to bring AI to the software you use the most: your smartphone’s keyboard.

On Tuesday, Singapore-based Acti launched an agentic keyboard for iOS and Android, one that doesn’t just suggest your next word but can take actions on your behalf, bringing AI tools directly into the apps you already use, including email, messaging, social media, and more.

According to Young Wang, Acti founder and CEO, this solves a problem familiar to anyone juggling multiple apps; users have to constantly switch between different apps just to get an AI’s help.

“Today’s AI agents are fundamentally limited because user context stays fragmented across separate apps,” Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview (due to time zone differences). Acti “sits across all of them, which is why we can build a context layer that genuinely belongs to the user instead of the platform,” he said. “That is the foundation the entire AI-agent era will be built on.”

The launch reflects a different idea about how consumers will ultimately embrace AI. Rather than asking users to open various AI chatbots, Acti showcases how AI can be embedded into the interfaces we already use.

For instance, if a friend wanted to know where to eat nearby, Acti (short for “action”) could drop in a local recommendation. Or if someone mentioned a stock in your conversation, Acti could be used to share the live price right there in the chat. Today, you’d have to switch to a search engine or other AI app to get this sort of information, then return to the app where the conversation occurred, which takes time.

Under the hood, Acti is powered by Google’s Gemini models, which Wang said were chosen for their balance of intelligence, speed, reliability, multilingual performance, and cost efficiency. Gemini is also well-suited for one of Acti’s key features, called Skills, which work like custom shortcuts: users can program a single key on their keyboard to trigger a multi-step task automatically — for instance, translating a message or instantly sharing a meeting link (see examples below).

Importantly, Acti is built around a local-first model, which means users’ personal context stays on their device by default for privacy’s sake. The company says the app does not access or store private messages, conversations, or personal context unless the user explicitly invokes a feature that requires external processing.

Wang says he was encouraged to work on a new keyboard for the AI era after previously spending a decade at Baidu, growing its Facemoji Keyboard to over 300 million daily active users.

“When LLMs arrived, I realized something fundamental had changed,” Wang said. “Text was no longer just something people typed; it had become a carrier of intent. And in many everyday contexts, that intent can now be directly translated into action.”

“That made me believe it was time to reinvent one of the most basic and universal products people use every day: the keyboard. For me, the opportunity to rebuild such a foundational surface for the AI era is deeply exciting,” he added.

Acti’s business model is still taking shape, but the company plans to generate revenue via subscriptions that offer users more advanced AI models, higher daily usage limits, and other premium features.

The app ships with some built-in Skills already, like “T,” which allows you to translate a message to another language by long-pressing the letter on your keyboard. Another Skill, “C,” will fire off a meeting link.

Users don’t have to know how to code to create a Skill, the company points out. Instead, you can just describe what you want in plain language, and Acti builds it. Ahead of launch, early access testers built over 1,000 Skills in less than two weeks.

These Skills can be either private for your own use or shared publicly to a Skills marketplace, where you can find those that people already built, like Skills for accessing real-time World Cup data or Polymarket links, among others. In the future, this Skill Hub could also offer additional monetization opportunities.

The company also shared with TechCrunch exclusively that it has just closed on $5.3 million in seed funding, in a round led by BITKRAFT Ventures.

“We backed Acti because this team has a real shot at owning the next phase of human-computer interaction,” said Jonathan Huang, Partner at BITKRAFT Ventures, about the firm’s investment.

The Acti team also includes CTO Mike Sun, who was the founding technical lead behind Yike Album, Baidu’s cloud-photo platform, which scaled to over 10 million daily active users. Also at Acti is CSO Junbo Yang, who joined from HashKey Capital, where Yang led dozens of consumer investments.

Acti is currently available for iOS and Android.

Meta’s Threads is adding new capabilities to its recently launched Live Chats feature while expanding access to more users, the company announced on Tuesday. The updates include support for translations, new tools for chat hosts, and more.

With support for translations, conversations in chats become more accessible to users around the world. Threads is also expanding the ability to start Live Chats to all “Community Champions,” which the company describes as users who are highly followed within their communities, regularly post in those communities, and keep conversations active.

Hosts can now also invite up to three co-hosts into their Live Chat to make it easier to manage conversations. Threads says this new capability is the equivalent of having a guest on your show or another voice to moderate a conversation. Additionally, hosts can now delete messages for everyone, and the platform is testing ways to make host messages appear more visually prominent in chats.

When Threads first launched, it struggled to compete with X as a destination for real-time conversations as it lacked key features like robust search, hashtags, and a chronological feed. Since then, Threads has added these capabilities and is now further differentiating itself with Live Chats, a feature designed for real-time engagement that even X doesn’t have.

The idea behind Live Chats is to help make Threads feel more timely and relevant. Since the feature’s launch, Threads says it has seen hundreds of chats hosted almost daily with thousands of users joining. The features added today are in response to what creators have been requesting, Threads says.

With Live Chats, users can send messages, photos, videos, links, and emoji reactions. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in “spectator” mode.

Threads also teased today that desktop support is coming soon and that pinned messages are in the works, both of which have been highly requested by creators.

Earlier this month, Threads reached 500 million monthly active users, nearly three years after launching as a competitor to X. Threads has introduced numerous new features over the past year, such as DMs, ghost posts, and desktop messaging, helping drive the platform’s growth.