Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest vs Claude Opus 4.6
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest vs Claude Opus 4.6: Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest is cheaper by 40% on average. Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest from Anthropic (200,000-token context, tool calls) vs. Claude Opus 4.6 from Azure AI Foundry (200,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.
Side-by-side cost
Live workload comparison
Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.
3,000
0200,000
400
0128,000
5,000
01,000,000
At this workload, Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest is 40% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 — a savings of $1,522/month ($18,263/year).
Production recipe — Agent Command Center
strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
model: claude-3-5-sonnet-latest
provider: anthropic
fallback:
model: claude-opus-4-6
provider: azure-ai-foundry
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 } # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live| Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest | Claude Opus 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $3.00/M | $5.00/M |
| Output price | $15.00/M | $25.00/M |
| Context window | 200,000 | 200,000 |
| Max output | 8,192 | 128,000 |
| Function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio input | — | — |
| Reasoning | — | ✓ |
| Prompt caching | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pricing verified | May 7, 2026 | May 12, 2026 |
Benchmark comparison
Side-by-side public benchmark scores. Greener bar = winner.
Chatbot Arena ELOgeneral
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
1,283
Claude Opus 4.6
1,502
GPQA Diamondreasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
65.0%
Claude Opus 4.6
91.3%
MMLUgeneral
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
88.7%
Claude Opus 4.6
91.1%
SWE-bench Verifiedagent⚠ different settings
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
49.0%
Claude Opus 4.6
81.4%
Humanity's Last Examreasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
—
Claude Opus 4.6
53.0%