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 price, and it lands squarely in the center 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, information work, and design. It contains a 1M token context window in beta. It is 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 models cost $15/$75 per million tokens — 5 instances the Sonnet value. But efficiency that might have beforehand required reaching for an Opus-class mannequin — together with on real-world, economically priceless workplace duties — is now obtainable with Sonnet 4.6. For the 1000’s of enterprises now deploying AI brokers that make thousands and thousands of API calls per day, that math adjustments all the things.
Why the price of operating AI brokers at scale simply dropped dramatically
To grasp the significance of this launch, you want to perceive the second it arrives in. The previous yr has been dominated by the twin phenomena of “vibe coding” and agentic AI. Claude Code — Anthropic’s developer-facing terminal instrument — has grow to be a cultural pressure in Silicon Valley, with engineers constructing complete purposes via natural-language dialog. The New York Times profiled its meteoric rise in January. The Verge lately declared that Claude Code is having a real “moment.” OpenAI, in the meantime, has been waging its personal offensive with Codex desktop applications and faster inference chips.
The end result is an {industry} the place AI fashions are not evaluated in isolation. They are evaluated as the engines inside autonomous brokers — methods that run for hours, make 1000’s of instrument 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 is not incremental. It is transformational.
The benchmark desk Anthropic launched paints a placing image. On SWE-bench Verified, the industry-standard take a look at 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 in the comparability, together with Opus 4.6 at 60.1%.
These are not marginal variations. In a lot of the classes enterprises care about most, Sonnet 4.6 matches or beats fashions that price 5 instances as a lot to run. An enterprise operating an AI agent that processes 10 million tokens per day was beforehand compelled to select between inferior outcomes at decrease price or superior outcomes at quickly scaling expense. Sonnet 4.6 largely eliminates that trade-off.
In Claude Code, early testing discovered that customers most popular Sonnet 4.6 over Sonnet 4.5 roughly 70% of the time. Customers even most popular 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 susceptible 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
One among the most dramatic storylines in the launch is Anthropic’s progress on laptop use — the means of an AI to function a pc the manner a human does, clicking a mouse, typing on a keyboard, and navigating software program that lacks trendy APIs.
When Anthropic first launched this functionality in October 2024, the firm acknowledged it was “nonetheless experimental — at instances cumbersome and error-prone.” The numbers since then inform a exceptional 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 functionality that unlocks the broadest set of enterprise purposes for AI brokers. Nearly each group has legacy software program — insurance coverage portals, authorities databases, ERP methods, hospital scheduling instruments — that was constructed before APIs existed. A mannequin that may merely take a look at a display screen 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 complicated insurance coverage laptop use benchmark, the highest of any Claude mannequin examined. “It causes via failures and self-corrects in methods we have not seen before,” Cuffe mentioned in an announcement despatched to VentureBeat. Will Harvey, co-founder of Convey, known as it “a transparent enchancment over anything we have examined in our evals.”
The security dimension of laptop use additionally bought consideration. Anthropic famous that laptop use poses prompt injection risks — 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 external methods, that hardening is not non-obligatory.
Enterprise clients 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 want to attain for the costlier Opus tier.
Caitlin Colgrove, CTO of Hex Applied sciences, mentioned the firm is transferring the majority of its site visitors to Sonnet 4.6, noting that with adaptive pondering 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 is a straightforward 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, known as the performance-to-cost ratio “extraordinary.” Ryan Wiggins of Mercury Banking put it extra bluntly: “Claude Sonnet 4.6 is sooner, cheaper, and extra probably to nail issues on the first strive. That mixture was a stunning mixture of enhancements, and we did not anticipate to see it at this value level.”
The coding enhancements resonate notably given Claude Code’s dominance in 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 crew is “transitioning our Sonnet site visitors over to this mannequin.” GitHub’s VP of Product, Joe Binder, confirmed the mannequin is “already excelling at complicated code fixes, particularly when looking out throughout massive codebases is important.”
Brendan Falk, Founder and CEO of Hercules, went additional: “Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the finest mannequin we now have seen to date. It has Opus 4.6 stage accuracy, instruction following, and UI, all for a meaningfully decrease price.”
A simulated enterprise competitors reveals how AI brokers plan over months, not minutes
Buried in the technical details is a functionality that hints at the place autonomous AI brokers are heading. Sonnet 4.6’s 1M token context window can maintain complete 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 firm demonstrated via an uncommon analysis.
The Vending-Bench Arena checks how properly a mannequin can run a simulated enterprise over time, with totally different AI fashions competing in opposition to one another for the greatest income. With out human prompting, Sonnet 4.6 developed a novel technique: it invested closely in capability for the first ten simulated months, spending considerably greater than its rivals, after which pivoted sharply to focus on profitability in the last stretch. The mannequin ended its 365-day simulation at roughly $5,700 in stability, in contrast to Sonnet 4.5’s roughly $2,100.
This type of multi-month strategic planning, executed autonomously, represents a qualitatively totally different functionality than answering questions or producing code snippets. It is 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 as the engine for a brand new technology of autonomous methods.
Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 arrives as the firm expands into enterprise markets and protection
This launch does not arrive in a vacuum. Anthropic is in the center of 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 announced 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 informed TechCrunch there is “a giant 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 informed ABC Information final week that AI would make humanities majors “more important than ever,” arguing that essential pondering expertise would grow to be extra priceless as massive language fashions grasp technical work. It is the type of assertion an organization makes when it believes its know-how is about to reshape complete classes of white-collar employment.
The aggressive image for Sonnet 4.6 is additionally 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 might not be about any single mannequin. It is about what occurs when Opus-class intelligence turns into obtainable for a number of {dollars} per million tokens moderately than a number of tens of {dollars}. Corporations that had been cautiously piloting AI brokers with small deployments now face a basically totally different price calculus. The brokers that had been too costly to run constantly in January are immediately reasonably priced in February.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is obtainable 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 via the Claude API.
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