Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Claude Opus 4.6 Verdict
- Claude Opus 4.6 leads on quality: 63.3 vs 61.4.
- Claude Opus 4.6 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, instruction following, knowledge, long context, maths, multimodal.
- Claude Sonnet 5 (high) is stronger in composite, human preference, reasoning.
- Claude Sonnet 5 (high) is 2.5× cheaper ($4.00 vs $10.00 per 1M blended).
- Claude Sonnet 5 (high) streams 1.6× faster (60 vs 36 tokens per second).
| Metric | Claude Opus 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 5 (high) |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 63.3 | 61.4 |
| Agents & tools score | 68.8 | 61.8 |
| Coding score | 62.4 | 61.6 |
| Composite score | 69.4 | 69.5 |
| Human preference score | 64.9 | 66.2 |
| Instruction following score | 53.9 | – |
| Knowledge score | 70.6 | 62.4 |
| Long context score | 65.5 | 64.8 |
| Maths score | 65.7 | – |
| Multimodal score | 63.6 | 63.1 |
| Reasoning score | 62.6 | 66.8 |
| Blended price $/M | $10.00 | $4.00 |
| Output speed | 36 tok/s | 60 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 2.4 s | 10.0 s |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| GPQA Diamond | 90.5% | – |
| OTIS Mock AIME | 94.4% | – |
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | 78.7% | – |
| Humanity's Last Exam | 19.0% | – |
| Terminal-Bench | 79.8% | – |
| SimpleBench | 67.6% | – |
| SciCode | – | 48.6% |
| Cybench | 93.0% | – |
| Remote Labor Index | 4.2% | – |
| WeirdML | 77.9% | 68.8% |
| APEX-Agents | 32.4% | – |
| FrontierCode | 26.6% | – |
| GSO-Bench | 33.3% | – |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 155.3 | – |
| LMArena Text | 1498 | 1462 |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1527 | 1490 |
| LMArena Coding | 1546 | 1521 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1537 | 1538 |
| LMArena Vision | 1311 | 1278 |
| LMArena Agent | – | 6.3 |
| AA Intelligence Index | 31.9 | 32.0 |
| IFBench | 53.1% | – |
| AA-LCR | 78.0% | 76.7% |
| MMMU-Pro | 75.4% | – |
| AA-Omniscience | 13.7 | -3.7 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 48.5% | – |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 89.6% | – |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 39.9% | 35.7% |
| SciCode (AA) | – | 54.3% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | 92.1% | – |
| HiL-Bench | 38.3% | – |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1223 | – |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 72.4% | – |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | 75.6% | – |
| SWE-bench Verified (any scaffold) | 75.6% | – |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 5: questions
- Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Claude Sonnet 5?
- Claude Opus 4.6 leads on quality: 63.3 vs 61.4. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Opus 4.6 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Claude Sonnet 5 for coding?
- Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in coding (62 vs 62 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Opus 4.6 better than Claude Sonnet 5 for agentic tasks?
- Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher in agentic tasks (69 vs 62 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 4.6 or Claude Sonnet 5?
- Claude Sonnet 5 is cheaper: $4.00 against $10.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
- Which is faster, Claude Opus 4.6 or Claude Sonnet 5?
- Claude Sonnet 5 streams faster: 60 against 36 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Both accept 1M tokens of context.