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Anthropic Makes Claude Sonnet 4.6 the Default, Adding 1M‑Token Context and Near‑Opus Performance

The mid-tier release delivers enterprise-ready capabilities to free/pro tiers at unchanged prices.

Overview

  • Claude Sonnet 4.6 introduces a beta 1 million‑token context window that can handle entire codebases, lengthy contracts, and multi‑document workflows in single sessions.
  • It becomes the default model for Free and Pro users in Claude.ai and Claude Cowork, with availability across the Claude API, major cloud platforms, and Microsoft Foundry.
  • Anthropic reports broad upgrades across coding, long‑context reasoning, agent planning, computer use, knowledge work, and design, with notable gains on OSWorld software‑use benchmarks.
  • Safety evaluations show stronger resistance to prompt‑injection attacks compared with Sonnet 4.5, with performance resembling the company’s latest Opus model in these tests.
  • Early developer testing preferred Sonnet 4.6 over Sonnet 4.5 about 70% of the time and often over Opus 4.5, while pricing remains the same as the prior Sonnet release.