Claude 4.6 Opus vs Claude 4 Sonnet

1. Anthropic's top model for coding and agents

• Anthropic positions Opus 4.6 as its most intelligent model for building agents and coding.
• It builds on Opus 4.5 with higher reliability and precision for professional software engineering, complex agentic workflows, and high-stakes enterprise tasks.

2. Strong frontier performance on real agent benchmarks

• Anthropic reports state-of-the-art results across coding and agentic evaluations.
• Public benchmark highlights include 65.4% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, 72.7% on OSWorld, and 90.2% on BigLaw Bench.

3. Best fit for long-horizon, high-context work

• Supports up to a 1M token context window in beta and up to 128K output tokens.
• Designed for long-running tasks that need sustained planning, careful debugging, code review, and strong context retention.

4. Advanced reasoning controls and workflow support

• Supports adaptive thinking and the effort parameter, including the new max effort level.
• Anthropic also introduced fast mode, compaction, and dynamic filtering with web search and web fetch for Opus 4.6-era agent workflows.

• Hybrid reasoning: supports both fast (“near-instant”) and extended thinking modes.
• Optimised for responsiveness, cost and high-volume production workloads.
• Strong coding performance relative to prior Sonnet versions (improved over Sonnet 3.7).
• Available even in free tiers (alongside paid plans).
• Better suited for general-purpose use and agents where speed + cost-efficiency matter.