Model · Anthropic · Text
Claude 4.6 Sonnet
Anthropic's mid-tier Claude 4 model, long the practical default for production workloads. Superseded by Claude Sonnet 5 (2026-06-30), which is a drop-in replacement at a lower price.
- Modality
- Text
- License
- Proprietary (Proprietary)
- Context window
- 200,000 tokens · up to 1M 1M tokens via Anthropic's 1M-context tier (beta)
- Released
- February 17, 2026
- Last verified
- September 8, 2026
- Runs locally
- No
- Also handles
- vision
Strengths
- Strong general-purpose performance at moderate cost
- 200k default context, 1M via the long-context beta tier
- Reliable instruction following
Weaknesses
- Closed weights
- Less depth than Opus on hard reasoning tasks
Try it
| Where | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic API | hosted-api | API key required |
| AWS Bedrock | hosted-api | Enterprise / regional |
| Google Vertex AI | hosted-api | GCP integration |
| Claude.ai | product | Free tier |
Version history
- Claude Opus 4.8 May 2026 Deprecated
- Claude 4.6 Sonnet Feb 2026 Current Deprecated
- Claude 4.7 Opus Feb 2026 Deprecated
- Claude Haiku 4.5 Oct 2025
Official sources
- Model docs docs
Change log
- — Deprecated — superseded by Claude Sonnet 5 (released 2026-06-30), documented by Anthropic as a drop-in replacement. Sonnet 4.6 moves to the legacy table; retirement not sooner than 2027-02-17.
- — Verified current vs Anthropic docs. Corrected release date to 2026-02-17 (prior 2025-09-29 was the Sonnet 4.5 snapshot date).
- — Initial entry.
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