# Claude Sonnet 4.6

Anthropic, released 2026-02-17

**Verdict: conditional.** Superseded by Claude Sonnet 5 (shipped Jun 30, 2026), which Anthropic now lists as legacy behind Claude Sonnet 5.5 as the current Sonnet. Both list at $2/$10 per 1M tokens against Sonnet 4.6's $3/$15, since Anthropic cancelled the scheduled rise to $3/$15. Sonnet 5 also adds a 13.4-point Terminal-Bench 2.1 jump. Choose 4.6 only for pinned deployments or where Sonnet 5's ~30% higher token count and removed temperature/top_p/top_k are disqualifying. Last verified 2026-10-13.

## Pricing

- Input: $3 / 1M tokens
- Output: $15 / 1M tokens
- Context: 1M tokens

## Strengths

- Pinned or reproducibility-sensitive deployments: teams that need a stable, unchanged model behind their pipeline rather than migrating to Sonnet 5
- Balanced production coding and document analysis: strong speed/quality/cost tradeoff at $3/$15 with a 1M-token context window
- Code that depends on temperature/top_p/top_k, which Sonnet 5 removed
- New default workloads: Claude Sonnet 5.5 is Anthropic's current Sonnet at $2/$10 per 1M against Sonnet 4.6's $3/$15; start new work there (Sonnet 5, also $2/$10, is now legacy)
- Longest-horizon agentic coding: Sonnet 5 finishes multi-step tasks 4.6 stalled on; Opus 4.8 / Fable 5 lead the frontier tier

## Benchmarks

- SWE-bench Verified: 72.7% (https://www.anthropic.com/research/swe-bench-sonnet)
- MMLU-Pro: 84.2% (https://www.anthropic.com/claude)
- HumanEval: 93.7% (https://www.anthropic.com/claude)

## Sources

- [Neomanex — Claude Sonnet 5 Ships (supersedes Sonnet 4.6 as default Jun 30)](https://utility.neomanex.com/news/anthropic-claude-sonnet-5-launch)
- [Anthropic Pricing](https://www.anthropic.com/pricing)
- [Claude API docs: Models overview (Sonnet 4.6 and Sonnet 5 listed as legacy, still available; Sonnet 5.5 current)](https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/overview)
- [Anthropic — Introducing Claude Sonnet 4.6](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-6)

Canonical: https://neomanex.com/models/claude-4-sonnet