Claude Sonnet 4 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Compare Claude Sonnet 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Image Captioning, OCR, Object Detection, Open Prompt, and Classification.
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Claude Sonnet 4 is deprecated and can no longer be run. Details and evals are still available on its model page.
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Claude Sonnet 4 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 Comparison Table
Evals updated July 10, 2026Pricing updated July 21, 2026
| Property | Claude Sonnet 4 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Category | closed | closed |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | May 2025 | Feb 2026 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | 1.0M |
| Parameters | ||
| License | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $3.00 | $3.00 |
| Output $/1M | $15.00 | $15.00 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Demo | |
| Classification | Demo | |
| Object Detection | Demo | |
| OCR | Demo | |
| Vision Language | ||
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | |
| Model Features | ||
| Foundation Vision | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | ||
| Multimodal Vision | ||
Claude Sonnet 4 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: Overview
Claude 4 Sonnet, released by Anthropic in May 2025, is the mid-tier model in the Claude 4 family, designed to balance capability, cost, and speed. It is multimodal, accepting both text and images, and extends beyond prior versions with improved “computer use” support, allowing API-driven interaction with desktop-like interfaces. By default, it supports 200,000 tokens of context, but as of August 2025, it also offers a 1 million-token context window in public beta—making it one of the most context-capable models available for processing entire codebases or large document sets in a single request.
Sonnet 4 is significantly cheaper than the flagship Opus while still demonstrating strong reasoning, coding, and instruction-following ability with reduced hallucinations. Its extended context capabilities and lower latency make it well-suited for enterprise-scale knowledge management, software development, research assistants, and productivity automation where both cost efficiency and high reliability are essential.
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.