Strong coding quality with 1M context at $3/1M input
Default model in Cursor and Windsurf, the two most popular AI coding editors
Best writing quality in its price tier — tone, long-form clarity, editorial polish
Weaknesses
Replaced by Claude Sonnet 5 and then Sonnet 5.5, which is stronger and cheaper
GPT-5.5 or GPT-5.4 are better picks when OpenAI computer-use workflows are the priority
Real-world use cases
What people actually use Claude Sonnet 4.6 for.
Daily coding in Cursor — debugging, refactoring, and feature implementation
Drafting polished client reports, strategy memos, and long-form editorial content
Answering research questions with up to 1M tokens of document context
How Claude Sonnet 4.6 compares
The nearest models people weigh against it, and what actually separates them.
vs Claude 3.5 Haiku — Against Claude 3.5 Haiku (Anthropic), Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs about 73% more per token, takes 5x the context and answers slower. Claude 3.5 Haiku is the one to check first if the price difference matters more than the ceiling.
vs Claude 3.5 Sonnet — Against Claude 3.5 Sonnet (Anthropic), Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs about 50% cheaper per token and takes 5x the context. Take Claude Sonnet 4.6 unless you specifically need what Claude 3.5 Sonnet does better.
vs Claude Fable 5 — Against Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic), Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs about 70% cheaper per token and answers faster. Take Claude Sonnet 4.6 unless you specifically need what Claude Fable 5 does better.
Price History
Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing over time
→0% since Aug 4
90 data points · tracked daily since Aug 4, 2026
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Start using Claude Sonnet 4.6
Daily coding, writing, and long-document work at a strong price-to-quality ratio. Start free — no card required.
Claude 3.5 Haiku is Anthropic's fastest and most affordable model in the Claude 3.5 family, designed for high-throughput tasks requiring quick responses without sacrificing Claude's core instruction-following quality. It handles a massive 200K context window while maintaining speed suitable for production pipelines.
Verdict
The fastest way to get Claude's quality in production — just don't confuse 'fast' with 'cheap'.
Quality score
64%
Pricing
$0.80/1M in
$4.00/1M out
Speed
Very fast
5/5 speed
Context
200k tokens
Output cost of $4/1M is notably higher than competing fast/mini models. Input cost at ~$0.80/1M is competitive. Best value emerges in input-heavy pipelines like document classification or RAG retrieval where output tokens are minimal.
High-volume, latency-sensitive applications like chatbots, classification, data extraction, and agentic tool use where speed and cost matter more than peak reasoning depth.
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is Anthropic's mid-cycle flagship model, balancing strong reasoning, coding, and instruction-following with a 200K context window. It sits between Haiku and Opus in Anthropic's lineup, offering near-flagship quality at a lower cost than top-tier models.
Verdict
One of the best models for coding and complex instruction-following, but its premium pricing demands premium use cases.
Quality score
81%
Pricing
$6.00/1M in
$30.00/1M out
Speed
Balanced
3/5 speed
Context
200k tokens
Pricing at $6 input / $30 output per million tokens is significantly higher than GPT-4o ($2.50/$10). Best accessed via Anthropic API or Amazon Bedrock. Claude 3.5 Sonnet (October 2024 version) supersedes the June 2024 release with improved performance.
Anthropic's June 9, 2026 Mythos-class flagship. At launch it was the most capable coding model anyone could use — 80.3% SWE-Bench Pro, an 11-point jump over Opus 4.8 — and it has since been overtaken by Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5. 1M context, 128K output, native parallel subagents.
Verdict
Superseded by Fable 5.1 — still 80.3% SWE-Bench Pro, but 5.1 is better and cheaper to run.
Quality score
97%
Pricing
$10.00/1M in
$50.00/1M out
Speed
Deliberate
2/5 speed
Context
1M tokens
Launched June 9, 2026 as the public, Mythos-class release. Available on the Claude API, Microsoft Foundry, and Google Vertex AI. Free for all users until June 22, 2026. Same underlying model as Claude Mythos 5, with safeguards that block specific high-risk cyber responses.
Coding leaderSWE-Bench Pro #1Mythos-classParallel subagentsAgenticLong contextPremiumNew
Best for
The hardest coding tasks, autonomous multi-step agents, and frontier-grade reasoning
Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens on the API, with cached input at $0.3 per million. A month of 10M input and 2M output tokens runs about $60.00 at list price, before any batch or caching discounts.
What is the context window of Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M tokens context window, with up to 128k tokens of output per response. That is the total of prompt plus response the model can hold in one request.
What is the knowledge cutoff of Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6's training data runs through August 31, 2025, and the model was released on February 17, 2026. For anything after that date it needs web search or documents in the prompt.
What is Claude Sonnet 4.6 best for?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is best for daily coding, writing, and long-document work at a strong price-to-quality ratio. It is a strong fit when that workflow matters more than the tradeoffs around premium pricing and balanced speed.
When should I avoid Claude Sonnet 4.6?
You specifically need desktop-control capabilities (GPT-5.5/GPT-5.4) or the absolute highest coding ceiling (Opus 4.7).
What is a cheaper alternative to Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude 3.5 Haiku (Anthropic) at $0.80/1M/1M input against Claude Sonnet 4.6's $3.00/1M/1M — roughly 73% less per token all in. The fastest way to get Claude's quality in production — just don't confuse 'fast' with 'cheap'. Compare it first if Claude Sonnet 4.6's pricing is the thing stopping you.
What is a faster alternative to Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude 3.5 Sonnet — balanced against Claude Sonnet 4.6's balanced, with 200k tokens of context. Worth the swap when response time is what your users notice rather than the last few points of reasoning depth.
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