Claude Sonnet 4.6
by Anthropic · anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6 · #290 cheapest of 325 paid models
Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 2:41 AM UTC · refreshed hourly
Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model yet, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It excels at iterative development, complex codebase navigation, end-to-end project management with...
Compare vs:GPT-5.6 SolGPT-5.6 TerraGPT-4.1GPT-4.1 Mini
Pricing
Input
$3.00
per 1M tokens
Output
$15.00
per 1M tokens
Blended (3:1)
$6.00
3 input : 1 output
Cache read
$0.30
per 1M cached tokens
Cache write
$3.75
per 1M tokens
Cache & batch economics
Effective prices for Claude Sonnet 4.6 with prompt caching.
| Cache hit rate | Effective blended $/1M | Example request* | vs no cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | $6.00 | $0.321 | — |
| 50% | $4.99 | $0.186 | −42% |
| 90% | $4.18 | $0.078 | −76% |
*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates for this provider’s batch API. Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.
What a request costs
| Workload | Input tokens | Output tokens | Cost / request | Cost / 1K requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short chat message | 500 | 300 | $0.006 | $6.00 |
| Document summary | 8,000 | 1,000 | $0.039 | $39.00 |
| Codebase question (RAG) | 30,000 | 2,000 | $0.12 | $120.00 |
| Long-context analysis | 150,000 | 5,000 | $0.525 | $525.00 |
Performance
Intelligence Index
35.9
AA composite quality
Coding Index
63
Math Index
—
Agentic Index
40.8
Output speed
60 tok/s
median
Time to first token
1.13s
median
Time to first answer
1.13s
after reasoning tokens
Artificial Analysis benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score |
|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 79.9% |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 13.2% |
| SciCode | 46.9% |
| IFBench | 41.2% |
| AA-LCR (Long Context Reasoning) | 57.7% |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 46.2% |
| τ²-Bench (Telecom) | 79.5% |
Design Arena Elo
| Category | Elo |
|---|---|
| Website | 1,312 |
| Web apps | 1,245 |
| Full-stack | 1,268 |
| Mobile apps | 1,272 |
| Android native | 1,211 |
| UI components | 1,313 |
| Data viz | 1,315 |
| SVG | 1,244 |
| 3D | 1,292 |
| Game dev | 1,315 |
| Agentic game dev | 1,210 |
| Godot game dev | 1,226 |
| Code categories | 1,309 |
| ASCII art | 1,271 |
Specs
Context window
1M
tokens
Max output
128K
tokens
Input modalities
text, image, file
Tokenizer
Claude