Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Opus 4.6 is Anthropic’s most advanced model for programming and handling extensive professional tasks. It’s designed for agents that manage entire workflows rather than isolated prompts, making it particularly effective for working with large codebases, implementing complex refactoring, and managing multi-stage debugging processes that evolve over time. Compared to previous versions, this model demonstrates deeper contextual awareness, better problem analysis, and increased reliability in challenging engineering scenarios. In addition to coding, Opus 4.6 excels at sustained knowledge-intensive work. It’s capable of generating near-production-ready documents, comprehensive plans, and thorough analyses in a single go, while maintaining coherence throughout lengthy outputs and extended sessions. This makes it an excellent default choice for tasks that demand persistence, sound judgment, and consistent execution—such as technical architecture, migration strategy planning, and end-to-end project management.

Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic’s strongest Sonnet-class model to date, delivering frontier-level performance in coding, agentic tasks, and professional work. It shines in iterative development, navigating complex codebases, end-to-end project management with memory, creating polished documents, and reliable computer use for web QA and workflow automation.