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
Anthropic
$2,283/mo
Input $3.00/M · Output $15.00/M
Azure AI Foundry
$3,805/mo
Input $5.00/M · Output $25.00/M
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
Cheaper option
~40% cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6
Larger context
200,000 tokens
More capabilities
5 of 6 capability flags advertised

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
HumanEvalcode
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
93.7%
Claude Opus 4.6
τ-bench (retail)agent
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Opus 4.6
91.9%
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%
MMMU-Promultimodal
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Opus 4.6
73.9%
ARC-AGI-2reasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Opus 4.6
68.8%
MMMUmultimodal
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
68.3%
Claude Opus 4.6
Humanity's Last Examreasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Opus 4.6
53.0%