Claude Code now defaults to Opus on $20 Pro and Team Standard plans, not Sonnet
Claude Code 2.1.280 changes the default model on Pro and Team Standard plans from Sonnet to Opus, "matching Max, Team Premium, and Enterprise". Pro costs $20 per month in the US, or $17 per month on annual billing, and a Team Standard seat costs $25 per month or $20 annually, so the two cheapest paid tiers now open on an Opus model unless the developer picks another one.
Claude Code on the web, one of the surfaces Anthropic ships the client on. Image: Anthropic
Anthropic did not say which plans could select the model when it launched Opus 5.5 earlier on September 22 with lower token prices and a promise of higher usage limits. The changelog answers that for Claude Code.
The default now lands on Opus 5.5
The same release adds Claude Opus 5.5 and calls it "now the default Opus model", so that is what a Pro or Team Standard user who has never picked a model with /model now gets. Anthropic's Claude Code documentation says you cannot turn thinking off on Opus 5.5 or the Fable models, which always use extended thinking, and thinking tokens are billed as output tokens.
Depth is set with /effort instead, and 2.1.280 changes how that carries over. An effort level you saved before /effort became per-model does not apply to newly released models such as Opus 5.5, Anthropic says, and they start at their own default until you pick a level.
Anthropic says the five-hour limits are rising
In its launch post Anthropic says it is "increasing five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans", and giving subscription users "a rate limit reset, which you can now save and use whenever you choose". Anthropic has published no figures for either.
Anthropic says Team and Enterprise members draw on a per-seat allowance that resets on a rolling five-hour window and a weekly window, shared with Claude chat and Cowork, and sized by whether the seat is Standard or Premium. Its pricing page says Pro gives "at least 5x more usage per 5-hour session than Free", and that a Team Standard seat gives more than Pro.
What the switch costs you
On a subscription, nothing extra. Anthropic's documentation says Pro and Max subscribers "have usage included in their subscription, so the session cost figure isn't relevant for billing purposes", and that on Team and Enterprise plans usage inside the seat allowance "isn't metered in dollars". The $4 and $20 per million tokens Anthropic charges for Opus 5.5 are API rates, billed to Console and cloud-provider accounts, and a Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise subscriber is never invoiced for them.
The cost turns up as allowance instead, and the two model families are metered apart. Anthropic says a developer who sees "You've hit your Opus limit" can keep working by switching to a model outside that family with /model, while a session or weekly limit is shared across every model and cannot be dodged that way. For API and cloud-provider accounts, where tokens are billed per use, the company names "Opus left as the default model" as one of the two usual causes of unexpectedly high spend. Those accounts are not affected by this change, which the changelog ties to the subscription plans.
How to put Sonnet back
Run /model to switch mid-session, or set a default in /config. Anthropic's own cost guidance still reads "Sonnet handles most coding tasks well and costs less than Opus" and tells developers to reserve Opus for complex architectural decisions or multi-step reasoning.
A switch to Opus also applies to any subagents that inherit the session's model, Anthropic says, so a single unchanged default can quietly raise what a long agentic run draws from a five-hour window.
