Claude Sonnet 4.6
Anthropic · released Feb 17, 2026
- Type
- Proprietary
- Input
- $3.00
- Output
- $15.00
- Cached
- $0.30
List price · per 1M tokens · Anthropic at 1M context · source ↗
Our take
Written Aug 3, 2026Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a proprietary text-and-image model from Anthropic that can handle up to one million tokens in a single request. It scores strongly on coding and instruction-following leaderboards, though every tracked host charges a premium rate with no budget tier available.
Choose this for long-document analysis or codebase work at one million tokens, where few alternatives match the context length. It is the sensible pick for coding and web-development tasks where measured leaderboard scores top 1520, or for instruction-following workflows that demand high precision. Skip it if cost is a primary constraint, if you need to run the model on your own hardware, or if creative writing quality is the deciding factor.
The case for it
- Exceptional context length for long-document and codebase work, at one million tokens.
- Strong measured performance on coding tasks, with Arena Coding and WebDev scores above 1520.
- Stable leaderboard presence over time, with variation under one point across tracked dates.
- Multiple throughput tiers on major clouds, from 13 to 45 tokens per second depending on provider and tier.
The case against it
- Premium pricing with no budget tier: every tracked host charges the same rate, so there is no price competition.
- Creative writing lags well behind its coding peak, a gap of over 75 points on the same leaderboard.
- Throughput is unmeasured on some channels and spans a wide range where it is recorded, from 25 to 45 tokens per second on one provider alone.
How good is it?
IntelligencePuzzles, maths, exam questions
Arena Text (overall)16th of 143 · 1471.7
CodingWriting and fixing code on its own
Arena Coding9th of 143 · 1526.9
AgenticPlanning, calling tools, staying on task
Arena Agent (IPS)15th of 36 · 0.032
WritingWe do not rate this
Two boards come close and neither tests writing: Arena Creative Writing asks people which of two replies they prefer, and LiveBench Language tests whether a model understood a passage. So we show where Claude Sonnet 4.6 placed and give it no mark out of five.
These tests check whether a model follows instructions — a precondition for all the work above, but not a measure of how well that work is done, which is why they get no rating.
Every published score for this model16 scoresEvery figure we hold, from 16 boards, with who ran it and a link to the source — including the boards no rating above is built on.
Or rent it from someone else
Why this differs from the header. The strip above quotes Anthropic's own list price. This is the cheapest live offer at the widest standard context we hold, whoever is serving it — a reseller undercutting a lab is ordinary commerce, not an error.
- per 1M tokens
- $3.00 in / $15.00 out
- Context served
- 1M
- Throughput
- Not measured
| Provider | In / out per 1M tokens | Context | Throughput | Trains on prompts | Logs prompts | Zero retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Bedrock | $3.00 / $15.00 | 200K | 48 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
| DeepInfra | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | not measured | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
| Microsoft Azure AIus-east-2 | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | 13 tok/s | No | No | Unknown |
| Microsoft Azure AIglobal | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | 32 tok/s | No | No | Unknown |
| Google Vertex AIglobal | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | 41 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
| Google Vertex AIeurope | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | 45 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
| Google Vertex AI | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | 25 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
| OpenRouter | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | not measured | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown |
| Anthropic | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M64K out | 38 tok/s | No | Yes30 days | Unknown |
| Amazon Bedrockglobal | $3.00 / $15.00 | 1M | 39 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
| Amazon Bedrockeu-west-1 | $3.00 / $15.00 | 200K | 53 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
| Google Vertex AIus-east5 | $3.30 / $16.50 | 1M | 19 tok/s | No | No | Confirmed |
Amazon Bedrock
Microsoft Azure AI
Google Vertex AI
OpenRouterAcross the 12 listings we hold: 10 say they do not train on prompts, 0 say they do and 2 do not say. 7 appear in the zero-retention registry we check; the rest are unknown to us rather than confirmed either way.
What each host's API supports
From the parameter list each endpoint publishes. Streaming is omitted: nothing we hold reports it, for any model.
- ✓
- Supported
- ✗
- Not supported
- Not published
- host gave no parameter list
| Provider | Tool calling | JSON output | Strict schema |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Bedrock | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| DeepInfra | |||
| Microsoft Azure AIus-east-2 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Microsoft Azure AIglobal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Google Vertex AIglobal | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Google Vertex AIeurope | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Google Vertex AI | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| OpenRouter | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Anthropic | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Amazon Bedrockglobal | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Amazon Bedrockeu-west-1 | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Google Vertex AIus-east5 | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Tool calling: 11 of 12 listings say yes, 1 publishes no parameter list. JSON output: 5 of 12 listings say yes, 6 say no, 1 publishes no parameter list. Strict schema: 4 of 12 listings say yes, 7 say no, 1 publishes no parameter list.
Models people weigh against Claude Sonnet 4.6
When we formed this view
Dates behind this page
Prices last checked 9d ago
What we do not know about this model yet
- 1 of 12 listings publish no parameter list, so what their API accepts is unknown to us.
- Nothing we hold says whether an endpoint streams, so we do not show it either way.
- 2 of 12 listings do not say whether they train on prompts.
Licence and identifiers
What the licence allowsWe hold no licence record for this model. Inside are the identifiers you need to pull it — its Hugging Face repo where we have one, our slug and a machine-readable card.
Licence
Commercial API terms. We hold no licence record for this model, so there is nothing to summarise here.
Identifiers
- Modality record
- text+image+file->text
- Catalogue slug
- anthropic-claude-sonnet-4-6