Claude Sonnet 4.6 is here
Anthropic just released the new Sonnet 4.6 model and it's already here in Claude web. But it's not available in Claude Code CLI at the time of writing this post, even though they mentioned that it's made available. The model is claimed to perform significantly better than the previous Sonnet 4.5 model, as you can see in the benchmarks here:
I am still exploring the model and will keep this post updated as I learn more.
Update:
Even though they mentioned that Sonnet 4.6 achieves Opus level intelligence, it actually doesn't as per the benchmarks. Here is a side by side comparison of Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6, as shared in a post on X:
But as Sonnet is a bit cheaper (see below table), this is expected.
| Model | Base Input Tokens | Output Tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.6 | $5 / MTok | $25 / MTok |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $3 / MTok | $15 / MTok |
1M token context window?
They mention in the announcement post that like Opus 4.6, Sonnet 4.6 also has a 1M token context window, but it's in beta currently.
Apart from this, one interesting thing they mention is:
Users even preferred Sonnet 4.6 to Opus 4.5, our frontier model from November, 59% of the time. They rated Sonnet 4.6 as significantly less prone to overengineering and “laziness,” and meaningfully better at instruction following.
I think, I can use Opus 4.6 for making detailed plans and then use Sonnet 4.6 for implementing them. This should be good enough for simple projects.
Wasn't showing in CLI, but this worked
The new model wasn't showing in the CLI, but running /model claude-sonnet-4-6 worked, as you see in the screenshot.
First, run the claude command and then the above model command and it should work.
Webmentions