Anthropic locks Sonnet 5 at $2/$10, cancels the Sept 1 price hike
The 50% hike builders braced for is dead. Today too: Codex CLI adds auto-approve, Vercel wires 100+ CLI connectors, Claude Code hardens synced skills.
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Your Sonnet 5 bill stops climbing
The $2/$10-per-MTok launch price is now permanent — the Aug 31 intro deadline and the planned Sept 1 jump to ~$3/$15 are both cancelled. If you penciled a 50% increase into your Q4 budget, delete that line.
Why now: a frontier price war
The freeze lands days after OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 rates (Luna to $0.20/$1.20 per MTok). The floor on frontier-grade tokens keeps dropping — worth re-running any build-vs-buy or self-host math you did earlier this year.
Codex CLI 0.147.0: auto-approval and portable plugins
OpenAI's Codex CLI adds a --approve-for-me flag for auto-reviewed approvals, installable Agent Plugins searchable across local, workspace, and remote catalogs, and the MCP 2026-07-28 protocol with paginated discovery. Unattended Codex runs just got easier to wire up.
Vercel Connect: 100+ connectors from the terminal
Vercel's Connect CLI now provisions 100+ connectors with a single command instead of the dashboard, and new Connect Observability adds line-level visibility into the token lifecycle. Enterprise Managed Users also went generally available.
Claude Code 2.1.228 sandboxes synced skills
Skills synced from claude.ai can no longer shadow your local commands or MCP prompts, and their bodies can't run ! shell commands or expand @ files — a real injection-surface fix. The Write tool can now overwrite files it hasn't read this session, matching Edit.
Transformers v5.15.0 makes kernels opt-in
Hugging Face's transformers 5.15 flips custom kernels from mandatory to opt-in — a breaking change to pin before you upgrade — and lands day-0 support for Meta's Muse Glimmer plus batched audio for Qwen omni models.