https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/20/claude-token-counts/
Article
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Simon Willison built a tool to count Claude tokens and compare across models.
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Discovered Opus 4.7 uses 1.46x more tokens than Opus 4.6 for same input.
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Tool requires an API key to tokenize, which struck some as odd.
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Image tokenization costs also highlighted as a concern.
Discussion
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Commenters suspect Anthropic made the tokenizer more semantically aware, increasing token count.
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Some see the token inflation as a hidden price hike, reconsidering Claude subscriptions.
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No official explanation from Anthropic on why the tokenizer changed.
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Suggestion to downsample images on upload to control costs.
Discuss on HN
