Claude Sonnet

Overview

This is a model family overview. For version-specific details, see the individual model entries linked below.

Claude Sonnet is the middle tier in Anthropic’s lineup and still the most practical starting point for most teams. Anthropic’s current documentation now frames Sonnet 5 as the balanced daily-use Claude tier for coding, analysis, writing, and tool-enabled assistants where quality matters but Fable or Opus pricing is hard to justify at scale.

Current Latest

As of July 6, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 is the current public Sonnet reference on Anthropic’s model page. Anthropic announced it on June 30 as the default model for Free and Pro plans, with access across Claude Code and the Claude Platform. This repo keeps Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 for pinned deployments and historical comparison.

Current Anthropic model docs list Sonnet 5 with a 1M-token context window and 128K max output. Launch pricing is $2 input and$10 output per 1M tokens through August 31, 2026, then $3 and$15 after that. Anthropic also notes that the newer tokenizer can map the same text to more tokens, so production teams should verify real workload cost instead of comparing only headline prices.

Strengths

• Strong general-purpose reasoning at a moderate price point
• Excellent coding assistance for everyday development tasks
• Good multimodal understanding for images and documents
• Strong instruction following for structured outputs and tool use
• Broad availability across Anthropic API, cloud-provider routes, and Claude products

When to Choose Sonnet

Sonnet is the default choice for most workloads:

• Day-to-day coding assistance, code review, and generation
• Content writing, analysis, and summarization
• Standard agentic workflows where Opus-level depth is not required
• Production systems where cost matters but quality cannot be sacrificed
• Interactive applications where response time matters

Access

• Anthropic API as claude-sonnet-5
• Amazon Bedrock
• Google Cloud Vertex AI
• Microsoft Foundry
• Claude consumer and workspace products, including Claude Code and broader Claude desktop or workspace flows where available