3 min readNew DelhiFeb 18, 2026 10:07 AM IST
Anthropic, on Tuesday, February 17, introduced to the world its most capable Sonnet model yet – Claude Sonnet 4.6. The AI company, which has been on a roll since launching a legal tool that created major market shifts earlier this month, is positioning its latest model as a practical daily driver.
“Sonnet 4.6 brings much-improved coding skills to more of our users. Improvements in consistency, instruction following, and more have made developers with early access prefer Sonnet 4.6 to its predecessor by a wide margin. They often even prefer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5,” the company said in its official blog.
The company claims that the new offering is a full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, design, and knowledge work. Much similar to its earlier Claude Opus 4.6, launched two week ago, the new Sonnet 4.6 features a 1 million token context window in beta. This allows the model to perform much longer and more complex work without the need for a session reset.
The new model demonstrates improved coding performance, enhanced computer use skills, upgraded long-context reasoning, and improvements in agent planning, etc.
When it comes to pricing, the company said that users on Free and Pro plans will now have Claude Sonnet 4.6 as the default model in Claude.ai and Claude Cowork. The pricing is the same as Sonnet 4.5 and starts at $3/$15 per million tokens. It needs to be noted that Anthropic is offering two branded AI models at different price points. While Opus has been a premium offering, Sonnet is more like an entry-level model but is pretty capable.
On the performance side, Sonnet 4.6 is capable of tasks that were once limited to Opus-class models, such as tasks related to real-world, economically valuable office tasks. The company claims that the model has shown major improvements in computer use skills when compared with its predecessors in the Sonnet class. The new model has reportedly shown significant improvements in AI-based desktop computer interaction.
Besides, the company has said it has run extensive safety evaluations of Sonnet 4.6 that showed it to be safe. “Our safety researchers concluded that Sonnet 4.6 has a broadly warm, honest, prosocial, and at times funny character, very strong safety behaviours, and no signs of major concerns around high-stakes forms of misalignment.”
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