Anthropic recently released Claude Sonnet 4.6, and after testing it — it might be the most interesting model of the year — not because it's the most powerful, but rather, because it’s the best mid-tier AI, at the time of this writing.
Sonnet 4.6 is already live on Overchat AI, and you can start chatting with it here.
So what's new, and why should you potentially consider choosing Sonnet over GPT-5.2, Google Gemini 3 Pro, or even Opus 4.6? Let's break it down.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the latest version of Anthropic’s mid-tier model. It replaces Sonnet 4.5, which launched alongside Opus 4.5 back in November 2025, and it’s now the default model on Anthropic’s own platform.
The Sonnet line is essentially the workhorse of Anthropic’s AI lineup. Haiku prioritizes speed at the expense of answer quality, while Opus 4.6 focuses on solving difficult tasks on the first try — but that comes with higher costs and noticeably slower response times.
Sonnet 4.6, by contrast, is fast enough for everyday use, affordable enough for very long conversations, and capable enough that you won’t feel the need to switch over to Opus 4.6.
In fact, during my testing, 80% of the time Sonnet 4.6 produced better answers than Opus 4.5, which was the flagship model just a few months ago.
Opus 4.6 is more expensive, but even if price — whether in real money or tokens — isn’t a concern, Sonnet responds much faster.
When I use AI chatbots, I want to get things done faster than I can without using chatbots, therefore I don’t want to wait for replies to simple questions.
I’d use Haiku, which is very fast, but, at the same time, I’m not confident I’ll get a useful answer from it.
In situations like this, a solid mid-tier model is the ideal choice — and right now, this is the best one.
Sonnet 4.6 introduces a 1-million-token context window (currently in beta) to a mid-tier model — a huge upgrade for working with large documents, navigating big codebases, or keeping conversations going for weeks or even months while preserving personalization from earlier interactions.
With Sonnet 4.5’s 200K limit, that ceiling was often reached. When it was, the model had to auto-compress the conversation — which was not only frustrating, but also caused it to forget parts of the discussion and degrade the quality of its responses.
In a similar vein, Sonnet 4.6 is noticeably better at coding. Planning, debugging, and working within larger codebases have all improved, and it often feels as thoughtful as Opus when tackling complex tasks.
OpenClaw continues to shape the direction of modern AI tooling, and our partner recently released Atomicbot — an easy way to install and run OpenClaw.
Sonnet 4.6 also improves “computer use” capabilities, allowing it to interact more effectively with its environment and complete tasks that extend beyond the chat interface — such as browsing online resources or working with websites and documents.
Last but not least, Sonnet 4.6 follows instructions more reliably. It’s more consistent in doing exactly what you ask and is less likely to get sidetracked or miss small (but important) details in long prompts or complex tasks.
Here's where Sonnet 4.6 sits on key benchmarks.
Coding:
Reasoning and knowledge:
Here’s how the new model compares with its internal and external competitors.
Sonnet 4.6 improves on its predecessor across every major benchmark. The 1M context window alone makes it a different class of model for anyone working with large documents or codebases.
Opus 4.6 is still the stronger model, particularly on the hardest reasoning tasks and in complex agentic coding scenarios.
But in benchmarks, the gap has narrowed. On OSWorld, Sonnet 4.6 trails by just 2.5 percentage points, and on SWE-Bench Verified — it’s about 8 points.
In practical terms, I didn’t feel much of a difference in writing and coding between these two, which is impressive, keeping in mind that Sonnet 4.6 is 40% cheaper on average.
In terms of benchmarks and raw performance, Sonnet 4.6 is roughly on par with GPT-5.2, and the pricing is similar as well, so the choice mostly comes down to personal preference.
Personally, I find that GPT models currently produce slightly better writing, while Claude has a more direct personality and is more likely to push back or point out mistakes — something I value highly in AI systems. For developers, both models are extremely capable.
You can try both models on Overchat AI and compare them side by side.
Pricing stays identical to Sonnet 4.5.
For context above 200K tokens, long context pricing applies:
If you want to use Claude Sonnet 4.6 without dealing with API pricing, you can chat with Claude on Overchat AI as part of a single subscription that includes all the latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the kind of update that reshapes how people think about model selection. It delivers a remarkable amount of power at a mid-tier price and packs flagship-level capabilities, including a 1M-token context window, industry-leading coding performance, and highly reliable instruction following.
Give it a try — this might become your new go-to workhorse model.
