Whatβs New
See Anthropicβs model migration guide for a full overview of changes. Claude 5 Sonnet introduces three major changes versus Sonnet 4.6:- Sampling parameters removed β
temperature,top_p, andtop_kare no longer supported and will be ignored - Adaptive-only thinking β when reasoning is enabled the only supported mode is adaptive;
thinking.budget_tokensis no longer supported andreasoning.max_tokensis ignored - New
'xhigh'effort level β a new effort level between'high'and'max'viaverbosity/output_config.effort
Sampling Parameters Removed
Claude 5 Sonnet no longer acceptstemperature, top_p, or top_k. If you pass these parameters, they will be silently ignored β your request will still succeed, but the parameters will have no effect.
Adaptive-Only Thinking
Claude 5 Sonnet supports only adaptive thinking. On Sonnet 4.6, reasoning could be controlled via a token budget (reasoning.max_tokens / thinking.budget_tokens) or left adaptive; on Sonnet 5, budget-based thinking is removed and adaptive is the only remaining mode when reasoning is on. The new API default is adaptive thinking on at effort high.
Reasoning is on by default on Sonnet 5: requests that donβt configure reasoning run with adaptive thinking enabled. Disable it explicitly with reasoning: { "enabled": false } if your integration assumes non-reasoning responses.
Concretely on Sonnet 5:
reasoning.max_tokensis accepted but ignoredreasoning.effortmaps to Anthropicβsoutput_config.effort(see Parameter Summary) rather than a thinking budgetthinking.budget_tokensis no longer supported upstream
verbosity. It maps to Anthropicβs output_config.effort and applies whether or not reasoning is enabled.
New 'xhigh' Effort Level
A new 'xhigh' effort level is available between 'high' and 'max' via the verbosity parameter. This maps to Anthropicβs output_config.effort.
low β medium β high β xhigh β max.
Sonnet 4.6 supported
low, medium, high, and max. Sonnet 5 adds 'xhigh' between 'high' and 'max'. For models that donβt support a given level, it automatically falls back to the next supported level ('xhigh' β 'high').Cyber Safeguards
Like Opus 4.7 and 4.8, Claude 5 Sonnet ships with real-time cyber classifiers that block some high-risk dual-use activities. Affected requests are refused upstream by Anthropic; OpenRouter surfaces the refusal as-is. See Anthropicβs Real-time cyber safeguards on Claude for details.Parameter Summary
With sampling parameters and reasoning budgets removed on Sonnet 5,output_config.effort is the remaining lever for influencing overall response effort. You can set it via verbosity, or via reasoning.effort when reasoning is enabled (verbosity wins if both are passed; 'minimal' maps to 'low', and 'none' disables reasoning entirely so no output_config.effort is sent).