Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's mid-tier large language model, released February 17, 2026, designed to balance performance, cost, and versatility for professional and developer use. It supports text and vision-based tasks with advanced reasoning, agentic capabilities, and Adaptive Thinking — a mode where the model dynamically scales its internal reasoning depth. A beta context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens (200K standard) enables processing of entire codebases or document collections in a single request. Parameters are undisclosed.
Optimized for coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, and knowledge work, Sonnet 4.6 delivers a full generational upgrade over Sonnet 4.5 and approaches Opus 4.5-level performance across many benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. It is the default model on Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, and is available via API and major cloud platforms — making it well suited for production workloads requiring strong reasoning without flagship pricing.
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Usage
Past 30 Days| Category | Passed | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Defect Detection | 12 / 15 | 80% |
| Spatial Understanding | 15 / 19 | 78.9% |
| Document Understanding | 7 / 9 | 77.8% |
| Object Understanding | 10 / 14 | 71.4% |
| Object Counting | 3 / 10 | 30% |
| Category | Passed | Score |
|---|---|---|
| License Plate Recognition | 27 / 30 | 90% |
| Text Recognition | 26 / 30 | 86.7% |
| Focused Scene OCR | 85 / 99 | 85.9% |
| VQA & Extraction | 44 / 60 | 73.3% |
| Handwritten Math | 5 / 10 | 50% |
Scores based on a single evaluation run · Methodology
View all Vision Evals →Claude Sonnet 4.6 costs $3.00 per 1M input tokens and $15.00 per 1M output tokens.
Pricing updated Jul 5, 2026
Estimated cost per task vs. Visual Understanding score, for this model and others ranked near it. Upper-left is the sweet spot (high quality, low cost).
11 of 11 models plotted
| Model | Score | Median tokens | Est. cost / task | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3.1 Pro | 75.8% | 1.1K | $0.0024 | Compare |
| Gemini 3 Flash | 74.6% | 1.4K | $0.0014 | Compare |
| GPT-5 Mini | 73.1% | 1.8K | $0.0006 | Compare |
| Qwen3.5 27B | 71.6% | 1.2K | $0.0002 | Compare |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | 70.2% | 2.2K | $0.0048 | Compare |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6(this model) | 70.2% | 2.3K | $0.0080 | — |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | 70.2% | 856 | $0.0060 | Compare |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite | 68.7% | 1.1K | $0.0003 | Compare |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | 68.7% | 531 | $0.0001 | Compare |
| Qwen3.6 Plus | 68.7% | 1.6K | $0.0005 | Compare |
| Claude Opus 4.8 | 67.2% | 2.2K | $0.012 | Compare |
Other models worth comparing for similar use cases.
Other versions in the same family as Claude Sonnet 4.6.
License terms and commercial-use guidance for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
License information is provided as a guide and is not legal advice.