Claude Sonnet 4.6 launches with improved coding and expanded developer tools

Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6, marking its second major AI launch in less than two weeks.

Scores prior to Claude Sonnet 4.5 (Source: Anthropic)

According to Anthropic, Sonnet 4.6 delivers improved coding skills to more users.

Tasks that once required an Opus-class model, including economically valuable office work, are handled by Sonnet 4.6. The model also brings improvements in computer use capabilities compared to earlier Sonnet versions.

Early customers report broad performance gains, with frontend development and financial analysis emerging as standout areas.

“Out of the gate, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is already excelling at complex code fixes, especially when searching across large codebases is essential. For teams running agentic coding at scale, we’re seeing strong resolution rates and the kind of consistency developers need,” noted Joe Binder, VP of Product, GitHub.

Within the Claude Developer Platform, adaptive and extended thinking modes are supported in this release. Context compaction, now in beta, condenses older conversation history as sessions approach token limits, expanding usable context.

Through the API, Claude’s web search and fetch tools generate and run code to sort and refine search results, retaining only relevant information in the working context. This process improves response quality and reduces unnecessary token usage. Code execution, memory, programmatic tool calling, tool search, and tool use examples are generally available.

“As with every new Claude model, we’ve run extensive safety evaluations of Sonnet 4.6, which overall showed it to be as safe as, or safer than, our other recent Claude models,” the company said.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now the default model for users on the Free and Pro plans in claude.ai and Claude Cowork. Pricing for these plans, including Sonnet API usage, remains unchanged.