Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is worth evaluating for coding, rag, and agents when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating coding, rag, and agents
- Workloads that can use a 1m context window
- Buyers comparing 4 tracked provider routes
Do not use it for
- Workloads where another current model has stronger sourced task evidence
- Family
- Claude 4.6
- Released
- 2026-02-17
- Context
- 1m
- Max output
- 64,000
- Architecture
- Decoder Only
- Knowledge cutoff
- 2025-08
- Specialization
- general
- Openness
- Proprietary
- License
- ProprietaryCommercial use: conditional
- Weights
- Not released
- Code
- Unknown
- Training
- Fine-tuned
Cheapest of 6 routes · Anthropic · cache read $0.300
About
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's best combination of speed and intelligence. Proprietary decoder-only model with 1M-token context, 64K max output, multimodal vision, extended thinking, and function calling. Available via Anthropic API, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI, and OpenRouter at $3/1M input and $15/1M output tokens.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a proprietary model in the Claude 4.6 family. The structured metadata tracks a 1m-token context window, multimodal input, reasoning, function calling, tool use, structured outputs, and code execution. This page tracks provider routes through OpenRouter, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, and 3 more, with the cheapest tracked route listed at $3 input and $15 output per 1M tokens. Headline tracked benchmarks include SWE-bench Verified 79.6, Terminal-Bench 2.0 59.1, and SWE-bench Multilingual 75.9.
Top use-case fit: coding, agents, and build tasks
Coding
Q/$ D3 relevant benchmarks in the decision map.
RAG
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Agents
Q/$ D3 relevant benchmarks in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare all 6Compare API pricing across 4 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Batch in / out | Cache | Route |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | $3.00 | $15.00 | $1.50 / $7.50 | read $0.300 / 5m $3.75 / 1h $6.00 | Serverless |
| AWS Bedrock | $3.00 | $15.00 | - | - | Serverless |
| GCP Vertex AI | $3.00 | $15.00 | - | - | Serverless |
| Microsoft Foundry | $3.00 | $15.00 | - | read $0.300 / 5m $3.75 / 1h $6.00 | Serverless |
Available via routers & gateways(16)
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
OpenRouter
HybridUnified hybrid gateway to 400+ models from 60+ providers via a single OpenAI-compatible API, with optional auto-routing that selects the best model per prompt.
Portkey
GatewayProduction AI gateway routing to 1,600+ LLMs with failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and guardrails; Apache 2.0 core is fully self-hostable with the complete feature set.
AIRouter
RouterCommercial LLM router that analyzes incoming requests and routes to the optimal model for cost/quality/latency via a drop-in OpenAI-compatible API, with a privacy-preserving embedding mode that avoids sending prompt content.
Amazon Bedrock Intelligent Prompt Routing
RouterAWS Bedrock's native intelligent prompt router that routes prompts between Anthropic Claude model tiers (Haiku/Sonnet) based on predicted task complexity, with no extra per-routing charge.
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Coding
Benchmark scores(19)
| Benchmark | Score | Version | Evaluation | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6 | SWE-bench VerifiedObserved 2026-02-17 | — | Source |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1 | Terminal-Bench 2.0Observed 2026-02-17 | — | Source |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | 75.9 | SWE-bench MultilingualObserved 2026-05-21 | — | Source |
| Google-Proof Q&A | 89.9 | diamondObserved 2026-04-28 | — | Source |
| MMLU PRO | 87.3 | —Observed 2026-04-19 | — | Source |
| τ-bench | 87.5 | τ-benchObserved 2026-04-24 | — | Source |
| MultiChallenge | 57.1 | MultiChallengeObserved 2026-04-26 | — | Source |
| Chatbot Arena | 1459.0 | —Observed 2026-04-28 | — | Source |
| MMMU Pro | 75.6 | official Anthropic system card, adaptive thinking, max effort, with image cropping toolObserved 2026-02-17 | — | Source |
| SWE-rebench | 60.7 | pass@1 (best of 5 runs)Observed 2026-05-28 | — | Source |
| AIME 2025 | 94.0 | AIME 2025 (accuracy)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 58.3 | llm-stats shows 0 (accuracy%)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 33.2 | HLE without tools (accuracy)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| HumanEval | 98.0 | HumanEval (pass@1)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| LiveCodeBench | 80.0 | LiveCodeBench score (accuracy)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| MCP-Atlas | 61.3 | llm-stats shows 0 (accuracy%)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| Massive Multitask Language Understanding | 89.3 | MMLU (accuracy)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding | 83.6 | MMMU (accuracy)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| CursorBench | 49.0 | CursorBench 3.1Observed 2026-06-30 | Configuration: Sonnet 4.6 Max Harness: CursorBench 3.1 Evaluator: Cursor Confidence: confirmed Notes: Highest CursorBench 3.1 score across Cursor's published effort configurations for this base model. | Source |
Migration checks
Rankings & picks(10)
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Comparison and alternatives
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Frequently asked questions
What is the context window of Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a context window of 1m tokens.
What is the max output of Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 can generate up to 64,000 output tokens.
How much does Claude Sonnet 4.6 cost?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available at $3/1M input tokens through OpenRouter.
When was Claude Sonnet 4.6 released?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 was released on 2026-02-17.
Which providers offer Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is available from 6 providers: OpenRouter, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI, Microsoft Foundry, Vercel AI Gateway.
What benchmarks has Claude Sonnet 4.6 been tested on?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has been evaluated on 19 benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified, Terminal-Bench 2.0, SWE-bench Multilingual, Google-Proof Q&A, MMLU PRO.
Cheapest of 6 routes · Anthropic · cache read $0.300