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 continues to frame Sonnet as the default choice for broad production work: coding, analysis, writing, and tool-enabled assistants where quality matters but Opus pricing is hard to justify at scale.

Current Latest

In Anthropic’s March 2026 docs snapshot, Sonnet remains the default Claude tier. This repo currently tracks both Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 pages because Anthropic product and pricing surfaces have referenced both in recent materials.

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, Bedrock, Vertex AI, 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 isn’t required
• Production systems where cost matters but quality can’t be sacrificed
• Interactive applications where response time matters

Access

• Anthropic API (direct)
• AWS Bedrock
• Google Vertex AI
• Claude consumer and workspace products