LLM·Dex
Newsletter
ProprietaryAnthropicmidtextvision

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Anthropic's mid-tier 4.6 release, the workhorse model behind most production Anthropic deployments.

Updated

Quick facts

Released
Jan 2026
Context
200K tokens
Output / 1M
Pricing not published
License
Proprietary

About Claude Sonnet 4.6

Sonnet 4.6 is the model most teams default to on Anthropic. It's roughly half the price of Opus 4.7, fast, and clears nearly every quality bar except the very hardest agent and reasoning tasks.

For copy, customer support, RAG, and most coding-assistant workloads, Sonnet 4.6 is the right pick. Reach for Opus only when a benchmark or hard task warrants it.

Benchmarks

Published scores from Anthropic's model card or independent leaderboards. We do not publish numbers we cannot source, see methodology.

HumanEval
,
Python coding pass@1
MMLU
,
Broad academic knowledge
GPQA
,
Graduate-level reasoning
SWE-bench
,
Real software-engineering tasks
Benchmark scores not yet available. We only publish numbers we can source from official model cards or independent leaderboards, see methodology.

Capabilities

Strengths

  • Excellent quality-cost ratio
  • Strong for code review and writing
  • Reliable tool-use
  • Mature ecosystem support (Cursor, Cline, etc.)

Tracked weaknesses

  • Tier below Opus on hardest agent tasks
  • More conservative refusal patterns for edge content

Pricing

Per-million-token rates as published by Anthropic.

Per-token pricing not yet published for Claude Sonnet 4.6. Check the official provider site for current tiers.

Call Claude Sonnet 4.6 from your code

Drop-in snippet for the Anthropic SDK. Set your API key in the environment and run.

typescript
import Anthropic from "@anthropic-ai/sdk";

const client = new Anthropic({
  apiKey: process.env.ANTHROPIC_API_KEY,
});

const message = await client.messages.create({
  model: "claude-sonnet-4-6",
  max_tokens: 1024,
  messages: [
    { role: "user", content: "What's the time complexity of quicksort?" },
  ],
});

console.log(message.content);

Best for

Tasks where Claude Sonnet 4.6 ranks among LLMDex's top picks.

Compare Claude Sonnet 4.6 with…

Frequently asked

  • How much does Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost?
    Anthropic has not published per-token API pricing for Claude Sonnet 4.6 at the time of writing. Check the official site for current pricing tiers, or compare against alternative models on LLMDex.
  • What is Claude Sonnet 4.6's context window?
    Claude Sonnet 4.6 supports a context window of 200K tokens.
  • Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 open source?
    No. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a closed-weight model, you can use it via Anthropic's API but the model weights are not publicly downloadable.
  • When was Claude Sonnet 4.6 released?
    Claude Sonnet 4.6 was released on Jan 20, 2026 by Anthropic.
Friday digest

Intelligence, distilled weekly.

One short email every Friday, new model launches, leaderboard moves, and pricing drops. Curated by hand. Free, no spam.