Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Side-by-side comparison of API pricing, specs, benchmarks, and capabilities
| Specification |
by Anthropic
|
by Anthropic
|
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Status | Current mid tier | Current mid tier |
| Released | Sep 29, 2025 | Jan 15, 2026 |
| Pricing per million tokens | ||
| Input | $3.00/Mtok | $3.00/Mtok |
| Output | $15.00/Mtok | $15.00/Mtok |
| Blended avg | $9.00/Mtok | $9.00/Mtok |
| Cached input | $0.300/Mtok | $0.300/Mtok |
| Specifications | ||
| Context window | 200K tokens | 1M tokens |
| Parameters | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Speed (TPS) | — | — |
| Modalities | ||
| Input |
textimage
|
textimage
|
| Benchmarks source: Vellum LLM Leaderboard | ||
| Avg benchmark score | 75.1 | 70.4 |
| Perf / dollar | 8.3 | 7.8 |
| GPQA Diamond | 83.4 | 89.9 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 42.8 | 59.1 |
| MCP Atlas | 59.5 | 69.5 |
| AIME 2025 | 87 | 83 |
| MMMLU | 89.1 | 89.3 |
| HumanEval | 82 | 79.6 |
| SWE-Bench Verified | 82 | — |
| LiveCodeBench | — | 72.4 |
| BrowseComp | — | 76.2 |
| OSWorld-Verified | — | 78.5 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 19.1 |
| ARC-AGI 2 | — | 58.3 |
| AutoBench | — | 5.3 |
| Independent composite scores each on its own scale — not part of the average above | ||
| AA Intelligence Index | — | 47.2 |
| AA Agentic Index | — | 40.8 |
| AA-Omniscience Index (−100–100) | — | 12.4 |
| LMSYS Chatbot Arena | — | 1471.7 ELO |
| Providers | ||
| Available from |
Anthropic — $3.00/$15.00/Mtok
|
Anthropic — $3.00/$15.00/Mtok
|
Cost at scale
1M tokens · 50/50 input/output| Volume | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M tokens | $9 | $9 | $0 (0%) |
| 10M tokens | $90 | $90 | $0 (0%) |
| 100M tokens | $900 | $900 | $0 (0%) |
| 1000M tokens | $9000 | $9000 | $0 (0%) |
When to pick which
distilled from the pricing and spec data above- raw capability matters more than price: 75.1 vs 70.4 average benchmark score
- you need the longer context: 1M tokens vs 200K (5×)
The cheaper option here — Claude Sonnet 4.5 costs $9.00/Mtok blended on Anthropic.
Summary
Claude Sonnet 4.5 by Anthropic costs $3.00/Mtok input and $15.00/Mtok output, with a 200K-token context window. It supports text, image input.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 by Anthropic costs $3.00/Mtok input and $15.00/Mtok output, with a 1M-token context window. It supports text, image input.
On benchmarks, Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher (75.1 vs 70.4) on average. In terms of value, Claude Sonnet 4.5 has better performance per dollar (8.3 vs 7.8).
Note: Pricing is per million tokens. Actual costs vary with usage patterns, prompt caching, and batch discounts. Always verify against official provider pricing pages.