> From the press release at least it sounds more expensive than Opus 4.5 (more tokens per request and fees for going over 200k context).

That's a feature. You could also not use the extra context, and the price would be the same.

The model influences how many tokens it uses for a problem. As an extreme example if it wanted it could fill up the entire context each time just to make you pay more. The efficiency that model can answer without generating a ton of tokens influences the price you will be spending on inference.