Claude Sonnet 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 | Jun 30, 2026 | Jan 15, 2026 |
| Pricing per million tokens | ||
| Input | $2.00/Mtok | $3.00/Mtok |
| Output | $10.00/Mtok | $15.00/Mtok |
| Blended avg | $4.00/Mtok | $6.00/Mtok |
| Cached input | $0.200/Mtok | $0.300/Mtok |
| Price basis | Standard pricing, per 1M tokens — not a promotional rate. $2/$10 was announced at launch as introductory pricing through Aug 31 2026, but Anthropic's pricing page now states that it "is now the standard price" and that "the previously scheduled increase to $3/$15 per million input/output tokens on September 1, 2026 will not occur". There is therefore no reversion date to watch. Verified 2026-08-13 against platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing. | — |
| Specifications | ||
| Context window | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Parameters | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Speed (TPS) | — | — |
| Modalities | ||
| Input |
textimage
|
textimage
|
| Benchmarks source: Vellum LLM Leaderboard | ||
| Avg benchmark score | 81.5 | 70.4 |
| Perf / dollar | 20.4 | 11.7 |
| GPQA Diamond | 96.2 | 89.9 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 80.4 | 59.1 |
| BrowseComp | 84.7 | 76.2 |
| OSWorld-Verified | 81.2 | 78.5 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 57.4 | 19.1 |
| HumanEval | 85.2 | 79.6 |
| AutoBench | 13.5 | 5.3 |
| SWE-Bench Verified | 85.2 | — |
| LiveCodeBench | — | 72.4 |
| MCP Atlas | — | 69.5 |
| ARC-AGI 2 | — | 58.3 |
| AIME 2025 | — | 83 |
| MMMLU | — | 89.3 |
| Independent composite scores each on its own scale — not part of the average above | ||
| AA Intelligence Index | 55.3 | 48.4 |
| AA Agentic Index | 49.7 | 42.1 |
| AA-Omniscience Index (−100–100) | 16.4 | 12.2 |
| GDPval-AA v2 | 1598.2 ELO | — |
| LMSYS Chatbot Arena | — | 1472 ELO |
| Providers | ||
| Available from |
Anthropic — $2.00/$10.00/Mtok
|
Anthropic — $3.00/$15.00/Mtok
|
Cost at scale
1M tokens · 50/50 input/output| Volume | Claude Sonnet 5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M tokens | $4 | $6 | $2 (33.3%) |
| 10M tokens | $40 | $60 | $20 (33.3%) |
| 100M tokens | $400 | $600 | $200 (33.3%) |
| 1000M tokens | $4000 | $6000 | $2000 (33.3%) |
When to pick which
distilled from the pricing and spec data above- cost dominates: $4.00/Mtok blended vs $6.00 — 33.3% less on the same 50/50 token mix
- raw capability matters more than price: 81.5 vs 70.4 average benchmark score
- this pairing gives Claude Sonnet 4.6 no edge on price, context, cache discount, or measured performance — pick it only for qualitative fit (ecosystem, compliance, model behavior on your prompts)
The cheaper option here — Claude Sonnet 5 costs $4.00/Mtok blended on Anthropic.
Summary
Claude Sonnet 5 by Anthropic costs $2.00/Mtok input and $10.00/Mtok output, with a 1M-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 a blended cost basis, Claude Sonnet 5 is 33.3% cheaper than Claude Sonnet 4.6.
On benchmarks, Claude Sonnet 5 scores higher (81.5 vs 70.4) on average. In terms of value, Claude Sonnet 5 has better performance per dollar (20.4 vs 11.7).
Note: Pricing is per million tokens. Actual costs vary with usage patterns, prompt caching, and batch discounts. Always verify against official provider pricing pages.