Anthropic on Tuesday launched Claude Sonnet 4.6, a mannequin that quantities to a seismic repricing occasion for the AI {industry}. It delivers near-flagship intelligence at mid-tier value, and it lands squarely in the course of an unprecedented company rush to deploy AI brokers and automatic coding instruments.
The mannequin is a full improve throughout coding, laptop use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, data work, and design. It incorporates a 1M token context window in beta. It’s now the default mannequin in claude.ai and Claude Cowork, and pricing holds regular at $3/$15 per million tokens — the identical as its predecessor, Sonnet 4.5.
That pricing element is the headline that issues most. Anthropic's flagship Opus fashions value $15/$75 per million tokens — 5 occasions the Sonnet worth. But efficiency that may have beforehand required reaching for an Opus-class mannequin — together with on real-world, economically beneficial workplace duties — is now accessible with Sonnet 4.6. For the 1000’s of enterprises now deploying AI brokers that make hundreds of thousands of API calls per day, that math modifications the whole lot.
Why the price of operating AI brokers at scale simply dropped dramatically
To know the importance of this launch, it is advisable perceive the second it arrives in. The previous 12 months has been dominated by the dual phenomena of "vibe coding" and agentic AI. Claude Code — Anthropic's developer-facing terminal device — has turn into a cultural drive in Silicon Valley, with engineers constructing whole purposes via natural-language dialog. The New York Occasions profiled its meteoric rise in January. The Verge just lately declared that Claude Code is having a real "second." OpenAI, in the meantime, has been waging its personal offensive with Codex desktop purposes and quicker inference chips.
The result’s an {industry} the place AI fashions are now not evaluated in isolation. They’re evaluated because the engines inside autonomous brokers — methods that run for hours, make 1000’s of device calls, write and execute code, navigate browsers, and work together with enterprise software program. Each greenback spent per million tokens will get multiplied throughout these 1000’s of calls. At scale, the distinction between $15 and $3 per million enter tokens just isn’t incremental. It’s transformational.
The benchmark desk Anthropic launched paints a hanging image. On SWE-bench Verified, the industry-standard check for real-world software program coding, Sonnet 4.6 scored 79.6% — almost matching Opus 4.6's 80.8%. On agentic laptop use (OSWorld-Verified), Sonnet 4.6 scored 72.5%, basically tied with Opus 4.6's 72.7%. On workplace duties (GDPval-AA Elo), Sonnet 4.6 really scored 1633, surpassing Opus 4.6's 1606. On agentic monetary evaluation, Sonnet 4.6 hit 63.3%, beating each mannequin within the comparability, together with Opus 4.6 at 60.1%.
These will not be marginal variations. In lots of the classes enterprises care about most, Sonnet 4.6 matches or beats fashions that value 5 occasions as a lot to run. An enterprise operating an AI agent that processes 10 million tokens per day was beforehand compelled to decide on between inferior outcomes at decrease value or superior outcomes at quickly scaling expense. Sonnet 4.6 largely eliminates that trade-off.
In Claude Code, early testing discovered that customers most well-liked Sonnet 4.6 over Sonnet 4.5 roughly 70% of the time. Customers even most well-liked Sonnet 4.6 to Opus 4.5, Anthropic's frontier mannequin from November, 59% of the time. They rated Sonnet 4.6 as considerably much less vulnerable to over-engineering and "laziness," and meaningfully higher at instruction following. They reported fewer false claims of success, fewer hallucinations, and extra constant follow-through on multi-step duties.
How Claude's laptop use talents went from 'experimental' to near-human in 16 months
Some of the dramatic storylines within the launch is Anthropic's progress on laptop use — the power of an AI to function a pc the way in which a human does, clicking a mouse, typing on a keyboard, and navigating software program that lacks fashionable APIs.
When Anthropic first launched this functionality in October 2024, the corporate acknowledged it was "nonetheless experimental — at occasions cumbersome and error-prone." The numbers since then inform a outstanding story: on OSWorld, Claude Sonnet 3.5 scored 14.9% in October 2024. Sonnet 3.7 reached 28.0% in February 2025. Sonnet 4 hit 42.2% by June. Sonnet 4.5 climbed to 61.4% in October. Now Sonnet 4.6 has reached 72.5% — almost a fivefold enchancment in 16 months.
This issues as a result of laptop use is the potential that unlocks the broadest set of enterprise purposes for AI brokers. Virtually each group has legacy software program — insurance coverage portals, authorities databases, ERP methods, hospital scheduling instruments — that was constructed earlier than APIs existed. A mannequin that may merely take a look at a display and work together with it opens all of those to automation with out constructing bespoke connectors.
Jamie Cuffe, CEO of Tempo, mentioned Sonnet 4.6 hit 94% on their advanced insurance coverage laptop use benchmark, the very best of any Claude mannequin examined. "It causes via failures and self-corrects in methods we haven't seen earlier than," Cuffe mentioned in a press release despatched to VentureBeat. Will Harvey, co-founder of Convey, referred to as it "a transparent enchancment over anything we've examined in our evals."
The protection dimension of laptop use additionally bought consideration. Anthropic famous that laptop use poses immediate injection dangers — malicious actors hiding directions on web sites to hijack the mannequin — and mentioned its evaluations present Sonnet 4.6 is a significant enchancment over Sonnet 4.5 in resisting such assaults. For enterprises deploying brokers that browse the net and work together with exterior methods, that hardening just isn’t optionally available.
Enterprise prospects say the mannequin closes the hole between Sonnet and Opus pricing tiers
The shopper response has been unusually particular about cost-performance dynamics. A number of early testers explicitly described Sonnet 4.6 as eliminating the necessity to attain for the dearer Opus tier.
Caitlin Colgrove, CTO of Hex Applied sciences, mentioned the corporate is shifting the vast majority of its site visitors to Sonnet 4.6, noting that with adaptive considering and excessive effort, "we see Opus-level efficiency on all however our hardest analytical duties with a extra environment friendly and versatile profile. At Sonnet pricing, it's a simple name for our workloads."
Ben Kus, CTO of Field, mentioned the mannequin outperformed Sonnet 4.5 in heavy reasoning Q&A by 15 proportion factors throughout actual enterprise paperwork. Michele Catasta, President of Replit, referred to as the performance-to-cost ratio "extraordinary." Ryan Wiggins of Mercury Banking put it extra bluntly: "Claude Sonnet 4.6 is quicker, cheaper, and extra more likely to nail issues on the primary strive. That mixture was a shocking mixture of enhancements, and we didn't count on to see it at this worth level."
The coding enhancements resonate significantly given Claude Code's dominance within the developer instruments market. David Loker, VP of AI at CodeRabbit, mentioned the mannequin "punches manner above its weight class for the overwhelming majority of real-world PRs." Leo Tchourakov of Manufacturing facility AI mentioned the group is "transitioning our Sonnet site visitors over to this mannequin." GitHub's VP of Product, Joe Binder, confirmed the mannequin is "already excelling at advanced code fixes, particularly when looking throughout massive codebases is crucial."
Brendan Falk, Founder and CEO of Hercules, went additional: "Claude Sonnet 4.6 is one of the best mannequin we have now seen thus far. It has Opus 4.6 degree accuracy, instruction following, and UI, all for a meaningfully decrease value."
A simulated enterprise competitors reveals how AI brokers plan over months, not minutes
Buried within the technical particulars is a functionality that hints at the place autonomous AI brokers are heading. Sonnet 4.6's 1M token context window can maintain whole codebases, prolonged contracts, or dozens of analysis papers in a single request. Anthropic says the mannequin causes successfully throughout all that context — a declare the corporate demonstrated via an uncommon analysis.
The Merchandising-Bench Area assessments how nicely a mannequin can run a simulated enterprise over time, with completely different AI fashions competing in opposition to one another for the most important earnings. With out human prompting, Sonnet 4.6 developed a novel technique: it invested closely in capability for the primary ten simulated months, spending considerably greater than its rivals, after which pivoted sharply to give attention to profitability within the remaining stretch. The mannequin ended its 365-day simulation at roughly $5,700 in steadiness, in comparison with Sonnet 4.5's roughly $2,100.
This sort of multi-month strategic planning, executed autonomously, represents a qualitatively completely different functionality than answering questions or producing code snippets. It’s the kind of long-horizon reasoning that makes AI brokers viable for actual enterprise operations — and it helps clarify why Anthropic is positioning Sonnet 4.6 not simply as a chatbot improve, however because the engine for a brand new era of autonomous methods.
Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6 arrives as the corporate expands into enterprise markets and protection
This launch doesn’t arrive in a vacuum. Anthropic is in the course of probably the most consequential stretch in its historical past, and the aggressive panorama is intensifying on each entrance.
On the identical day as this launch, TechCrunch reported that Indian IT large Infosys introduced a partnership with Anthropic to construct enterprise-grade AI brokers, integrating Claude fashions into Infosys's Topaz AI platform for banking, telecoms, and manufacturing. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei advised TechCrunch there’s "an enormous hole between an AI mannequin that works in a demo and one which works in a regulated {industry}," and that Infosys helps bridge it. TechCrunch additionally reported that Anthropic opened its first India workplace in Bengaluru, and that India now accounts for about 6% of world Claude utilization, second solely to the U.S. The corporate, which CNBC reported is valued at $183 billion, has been increasing its enterprise footprint quickly.
In the meantime, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei advised ABC Information final week that AI would make humanities majors "extra essential than ever," arguing that important considering abilities would turn into extra beneficial as massive language fashions grasp technical work. It’s the form of assertion an organization makes when it believes its expertise is about to reshape whole classes of white-collar employment.
The aggressive image for Sonnet 4.6 can also be notable. The mannequin outperforms Google's Gemini 3 Professional and OpenAI's GPT-5.2 on a number of benchmarks. GPT-5.2 trails on agentic laptop use (38.2% vs. 72.5%), agentic search (77.9% vs. 74.7% for Sonnet 4.6's non-Professional rating), and agentic monetary evaluation (59.0% vs. 63.3%). Gemini 3 Professional exhibits aggressive efficiency on visible reasoning and multilingual benchmarks, however falls behind on the agentic classes the place enterprise funding is surging.
The broader takeaway is probably not about any single mannequin. It’s about what occurs when Opus-class intelligence turns into accessible for just a few {dollars} per million tokens reasonably than just a few tens of {dollars}. Firms that have been cautiously piloting AI brokers with small deployments now face a basically completely different value calculus. The brokers that have been too costly to run constantly in January are all of a sudden reasonably priced in February.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is accessible now on all Claude plans, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, the API, and all main cloud platforms. Anthropic has additionally upgraded its free tier to Sonnet 4.6 by default. Builders can entry it instantly utilizing claude-sonnet-4-6 by way of the Claude API.
