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Anthropic · Claude
No. 04
Claude Sonnet 4.6
The production workhorse — best balance of speed and intelligence.
Field notes
- Context window
- 1Mtokens
- Max output
- 64Ktokens
- Input price
- $3/ 1M tokens
- Output price
- $15/ 1M tokens
- Cached input
- $0.30/ 1M tokens
- Modalities
- Text, Image, Pdf
- Knowledge cutoff
- Nov 2025
- Released
- Feb 2026
- Approx. speed
- —
Overview
What this model is
Claude Sonnet 4.6 offers the best balance of speed and intelligence in the Claude lineup and is the default production workhorse for most agentic and coding workloads. It handles the large majority of real tasks reliably at a fraction of Opus pricing, escalating to Opus or Fable only for the hardest jobs. Its 1M context and strong tool use make it a dependable everyday driver.
Strengths
- Excellent speed-to-intelligence balance
- Reliable everyday agentic coding
- 1M context at a moderate price
- Strong tool use and instruction following
Trade-offs
- Below Opus/Fable on the hardest long-horizon jobs
- 64K max output cap
- No audio/video input
Best for
- Everyday production coding agents
- High-volume developer workflows
- Chat and assistant backends
- RAG and document analysis
Not ideal for
- The most demanding autonomous coding runs
- Tasks needing very long single outputs
Capabilities
Capability profile
Normalized 0–100 scores, comparable across the whole catalog.
- Reasoning
- 89
- Coding
- 89
- Math
- 86
- Writing
- 90
- Knowledge
- 90
- Speed
- 78
- Agentic
- 88
- Vision
- 84
- Multilingual
- 89
- Long Context
- 92
Benchmarks
How it scores
Public benchmark results, with independent third-party results where available. Bars normalize percentages to 100 and Elo ratings to a 1500 ceiling.
Independent index
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
Composite of ~9–10 independent evals · Artificial Analysis
47/ 100
BenchmarkResult
Artificial Analysis Intelligence Indexindependent
GeneralArtificial Analysis
47%
SWE-bench Verifiedindependent
CodingSWE-bench
79.6%
τ-benchindependent
Agenticτ-bench
87.5%
LiveBenchindependent
GeneralLiveBench
75.5%
GPQA Diamondindependent
ReasoningIndependent aggregators
89.9%
DeepSWEindependent
CodingDatacurve
32%
LMArena Eloindependent
GeneralLMArena
1467Elo