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Claude seems to waste a lot of tokens internally bickering with itself. As much as organizations are optimizing spend, Claude's product guidance seems to be doing everything to fight against that headwind. When operating in a capped cost environment, engineers will simply get less use out of it.

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Boris from the team here. The classifier is free — we do not charge for safety features as a principle.

That’s good to know, thank you.

Is this new? I remember something in the UI saying Auto mode uses x% more tokens

Yes, it's in the article:

> The auto mode classifier uses a small number of extra tokens per tool call, and we're no longer charging Claude Code users on Pro, Max, and Team plans for that classifier overhead, effective today

That's a bit difference that Boris's claim that they don't charge for this as a "principle".

This just sounds like they bump their unspecified limits by N% to cover this usage. Which of course means nothing because the next time they re-evaluate their limits they will just ignore this bump.

The classifier runs Sonnet so I doubt it contributes too much.

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