Claude Sonnet 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Sonnet 5 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It supports adaptive thinking with selectable reasoning effort levels (low, medium, high, max, and x-high), a 1M-token context window, and text, image, and file inputs. Sonnet 5 uses an updated tokenizer and includes real-time cyber safeguards that block certain high-risk dual-use activities.

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.