Claude Sonnet 4.6

Name: Claude Sonnet 4.6
Author: Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.6 was Anthropic's mid-tier large language model in its 4.x generation, balancing performance and cost for everyday coding and reasoning tasks. Anthropic has since released Claude Sonnet 5 as its current mid-tier model, succeeding the 4.x Sonnet generation.

By AnthropicPay as you goSince 2021AI Models

Facts checked on 27 September 2026 against the sources listed at the end of this page.

Visit anthropic.com

Newer version available. Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 5 as its current mid-tier model, succeeding the 4.x generation that included Sonnet 4.6.

Pricing: Pay as you goPaid from Priced per million tokens via the Anthropic API; see Anthropic's current pricing for active models
Open source: NoProprietary

A good fit for

Researching the history and progression of Anthropic's Claude Sonnet model generations
Understanding capability and pricing context for Anthropic's current Sonnet 5 model

Not a good fit for

New projects, since Anthropic's current mid-tier model, Sonnet 5, has since succeeded the 4.x generation
Anyone wanting the latest available mid-tier model from Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.6 pricing

Claude Sonnet 4.6 was priced per million tokens through the Anthropic API. Anthropic's current mid-tier model, Claude Sonnet 5, has since launched; check Anthropic's current pricing page for active models.

Prices in USD, checked on 27 September 2026. Current prices on anthropic.com.

Main features

Balanced performance and cost: Positioned between Anthropic's lighter Haiku models and flagship Opus models.
Coding capability: Used for everyday software development tasks including with Claude Code.
General reasoning: Suited to a wide range of writing, reasoning and analysis tasks.

About Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Sonnet 4.6 was positioned as Anthropic's balanced, mid-tier model in the 4.x generation, aimed at everyday coding, writing and reasoning tasks where a lighter, faster and cheaper model than the flagship Opus tier was preferred.

It was accessible through the Anthropic API and integrated into Claude's consumer apps and developer tools, including Claude Code, during its time as part of Anthropic's active model lineup.

Anthropic has since released Claude Sonnet 5 as the current mid-tier model, succeeding the 4.x Sonnet generation with improved capability.

Made by: Anthropic
Free plan: Limited access via Claude's free tier; full access via paid plans or API
Available on: API, Claude apps (historically), Claude Code (historically)

Claude Sonnet 4.6 alternatives

Tool	Pricing	GitHub stars
StarCoderOpen source code-generation model from the BigCode project, trained on 80+ programming languages.	Open source	7.5k
Gemma 4Google DeepMind's current generation of lightweight, open-weight language models.	Open source	5.8k
DeepSeek V4DeepSeek's current open-weight model family, including V4.1-Flash and V4-Pro.	Open source	None
DevstralMistral AI's open-weight model built specifically for coding and software engineering agents.	Open source	None
Gemini 3.1 ProGoogle's third-generation Gemini Pro model, currently in preview, for complex reasoning tasks.	Pay as you go	None
GPT-5.3 CodexOpenAI's specialized coding model, priced separately from its general-purpose GPT models.	Pay as you go	None

Questions about Claude Sonnet 4.6

Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 still available?

Anthropic's current mid-tier model is Claude Sonnet 5, which succeeded the 4.x generation that included Sonnet 4.6; availability of the older model should be confirmed directly with Anthropic.

What replaced Claude Sonnet 4.6?

Claude Sonnet 5, Anthropic's current mid-tier model.

Sources and links

Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance, TechCrunch

Documentation

Work on Claude Sonnet 4.6? Claim this listing. Something wrong or out of date? Suggest a correction. Stats come from the public GitHub and npm APIs and update every day.