Claude Sonnet 5 vs Llama 4 Scout

Claude Sonnet 5 is a mid-tier large language model from Anthropic, released on June 30, 2026, as the latest model in the Sonnet series and a direct successor to Claude Sonnet 4.6. It is a hybrid reasoning model designed primarily for agentic workflows, software coding, and professional tasks. The model features a 1 million token context window, a 128k maximum output token limit, and runs adaptive thinking by default, giving API users fine-grained control over reasoning effort across five levels (low, medium, high, max, and extra-high). It uses an updated tokenizer shared with Opus 4.7 and later models, which produces approximately 30% more tokens for equivalent text compared to earlier Claude models. On benchmarks, Sonnet 5 scores 63.2% on agentic coding and 81.2% on OSWorld, narrowing the gap with Opus 4.8 while remaining at Sonnet-tier pricing.

The model supports text and image input with text output, and accepts tools including browsers and terminals for autonomous multi-step task execution. Anthropic's safety evaluations report that Sonnet 5 shows a lower rate of undesirable behaviors than Sonnet 4.6 and is generally safer in agentic contexts, with improved resistance to prompt injection and reduced sycophancy. Cybersecurity safeguards equivalent to those on Opus 4.7 and 4.8 are active, though Anthropic notes the model was not deliberately trained on cybersecurity tasks. The model is proprietary and API-only, with no open weights.

Llama 4 Scout, released on April 5, 2025, is one of Meta AI’s first Llama 4 multimodal models, alongside Maverick. It accepts text + image inputs and produces text outputs, with a knowledge cutoff of August 2024. Scout is notable for its extremely large context window of 10 million tokens, making it well-suited for analyzing very long documents, extended conversations, or large codebases.

Architecturally, Scout uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) system with 16 experts, activating ~17B parameters per inference from a pool of ~109B total parameters, balancing capacity with efficiency. It officially supports 12 languages (including English, Arabic, French, Hindi, and Spanish), while offering multimodal reasoning for images (captioning, Q&A, recognition). Meta highlights that Scout can run on a single Nvidia H100 GPU, making it more accessible than larger-scale Llama 4 models. However, its output token limit is far smaller than its 10M input window, image input support is still constrained, and license restrictions apply for large-scale commercial deployments.