Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o1
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at speed (83 vs 30 on our capability index).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 80% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 has a 1M context window vs 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | o1 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | OpenAI |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 200,000 tokens (100,000 max output) |
| Input / 1M tokens | ✓$3.00 | $15.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $15.00 | $60.00 |
| Release date | 2026-02 | 2024-12 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | o1 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 79.6% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 59.1% | - |
| OSWorld-Verified | 72.5% | - |
| GPQA | 79.7% | - |
| AIME 2024 | - | 74% |
| GPQA Diamond | - | 77.3% |
| Codeforces | - | ~89th percentile |
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 o1 if...
- →Hard, multi-step math, science, and logic problems that reward deliberate reasoning
- →Competitive programming and algorithmic problem solving
- →Existing o1-based pipelines already validated for reasoning tasks