Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6, released by Anthropic in February 2026, is a large language model from the Claude 4 family designed for complex agent orchestration, extended reasoning, and long-form code generation. It features a 200K token context window (extendable to 1M tokens in beta), 128K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking with both standard and adaptive effort modes. Opus 4.6 targets multi-step agentic workflows, parallel tool use, and applications requiring sustained reasoning over large contexts.

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.5, released by Anthropic in September 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4.5 family that balances response quality and efficiency for coding, agentic tasks, and analytical work. It features a 200K token context window (extendable to 1M tokens in beta), 64K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking support. Sonnet 4.5 targets use cases that require a balance of throughput and reasoning depth, including code generation, data analysis, and multi-step agentic pipelines.