LANGUAGE MODEL Anthropic Last updated:

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Non-reasoning, Low Effort)

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Non-reasoning, Low Effort) is an API model from Anthropic. It’s positioned for general text tasks—work that benefits from iteration, not just one-shot answers.

Try Claude API Docs ↗
Intelligence
Top 10%
Speed
Slow
58 tok/s output
Cost
High
$3.75 in / $15.00 out
Context
1M
Up to 1,000,000 tokens
How are Intelligence, Speed & Cost bucketed?
Intelligence and Speed buckets are percentile ranks on Artificial Analysis. Cost buckets are fixed dollar thresholds keyed off output-token price ($/M out).
Intelligence
  • Top 1%≤ 1%
  • Top 5%≤ 5%
  • Top 10%≤ 10%
  • Good≤ 25%
  • Medium≤ 50%
  • Below avg> 50%
Speed
  • Top 1%≥ 345 tok/s
  • Top 5%≥ 237 tok/s
  • Top 10%≥ 196 tok/s
  • Good≥ 146 tok/s
  • Medium≥ 90 tok/s
  • Slow< 90 tok/s
Cost
  • Freeopen weights · self-host
  • Low< $1 / M out
  • Moderate$1–5 / M out
  • High≥ $5 / M out
Official ↗ Artificial Analysis ↗

Core Capabilities

Long Documents
Handles entire codebases, books, and multi-doc RAG.

Context Window

1M tokens
≈ entire codebase
4k Chat 聊天
32k Long docs 长文档
128k Books 整本书
400k Multi-doc 多文档
1M This model 本模型
10M

Availability

API
Available
Product / App
Not available
Open Source
Not released
Enterprise
Contact sales

Pricing Model

Pay per token
Input and output billed separately.
Pay-per-token

Capability / Performance

Where this model sits relative to the middle 60% of models in the tree. All scores are 0–10 (higher is better).

Lower 20% Upper 80% This model
Reasoning
AA Intelligence Index · scaled to 10
1.7
5.6
6.1
Coding
SciCode · scaled to 10
1.8
4.3
4.4
Agentic tasks
Terminal-Bench Hard · scaled to 10
0.2
3.6
4.2
Context / memory
Context window size · log-scaled
6.0
9.0
9.0
Cost efficiency
Input price ($/M tokens) · cheaper scores higher
6.2
10.0
4.5
Lower 20% 20th percentile — 20% of models score below this This model Where the current model lands Upper 80% 80th percentile — only 20% of models score above this Percentile boundaries are computed across every model in the tree that reports the underlying benchmark for each capability.

What it feels like

  • Topped SWE-bench Verified at release — Cognition reported 18% planning gain and 12% end-to-end eval gain for Devin
  • Edit accuracy is the headline change — internal code-editing error rate dropped from 9% on Sonnet 4 to 0%
  • Sustains 30+ hour autonomous coding focus without losing the thread
Reviews: Anthropic — Claude Sonnet 4.5 announcement ↗ · InfoQ — Sonnet 4.5 tops SWE-bench ↗ · Caylent — Sonnet 4.5 highest-scoring Claude on SWE-bench ↗

Best use cases

  • Production agentic coding (Devin, Cursor, Cline) where reliability matters
  • AI SRE / on-call automation with long task horizons
  • Day-to-day software engineering at scale on real GitHub issues

Tools to try

Claude Code Cursor Cline Continue.dev Aider

Not ideal for

  • The very hardest reasoning tasks — Opus 4.5 still leads by ~7 points on AA Intelligence Index
  • Simple chat or casual Q&A — try Haiku 4.5 instead

Model Evolution

claude-sonnet is Anthropic's language model family.

Claude Sonnet 4.5
Sep 2025
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Nov 2025
Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Non-reasoning, Low Effort)
Jan 2026
View full evolution tree →