Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 5 leads on 2 of 2 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (~85.2% vs 79.6%), OSWorld-Verified (81.2% vs 72.5%).
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $3.00 | $3.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $15.00 |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6% | ✓~85.2% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | ✓81.2% |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | - | 80.4% |
| SWE-bench Pro | - | 63.2% |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if...
- →You have an existing integration pinned to Sonnet 4.6 and want stability
- →You need a proven mid-tier model with 1M context at $3/$15
- →You want predictable behavior without the new-tokenizer/thinking changes in Sonnet 5
- →You are cost-sensitive and don't need Sonnet 5's incremental gains
Choose Claude Sonnet 5 if...
- →You want frontier-adjacent agentic coding but need better cost-efficiency than Opus
- →You are running high-volume agent loops and want strong reasoning per dollar
- →You are already on Sonnet 4.6 and want a same-price capability upgrade
- →You need a 1M context window with fast latency