What is the difference between the xhigh and max effort levels?

Both xhigh and max sit at the top of Sonnet 5's five-level effort scale, above high, and both are associated with deeper reasoning and correspondingly higher token cost than lower levels.

In practice, reporting from early usage suggests max effort on Sonnet 5 can approach costs comparable to Opus 4.8 while sometimes performing slightly worse on certain benchmarks - at that point, switching to an Opus-class model, rather than pushing Sonnet 5 to its own ceiling, tends to be the better-value choice.

The general guidance is to treat xhigh as the level worth reaching for when a specific task genuinely needs deeper reasoning than high provides, and to treat max on Sonnet 5 with more caution, testing carefully rather than assuming it's simply the best setting by default.

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