Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest is cheaper by 0% on average. Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest from Anthropic (200,000-token context, tool calls) vs. Claude Sonnet 4.6 from Azure AI Foundry (1,000,000-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
01,000,000
400
064,000
5,000
01,000,000
Anthropic
$2,283/mo
Input $3.00/M · Output $15.00/M
Azure AI Foundry
$2,283/mo
Input $3.00/M · Output $15.00/M
At this workload, Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 0% cheaper than Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest — a savings of $0.000000/month ($0.000000/year).
Production recipe — Agent Command Center
strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
  model: claude-sonnet-4-6
  provider: azure-ai-foundry
fallback:
  model: claude-3-5-sonnet-latest
  provider: anthropic
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 }   # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest Claude Sonnet 4.6
Input price $3.00/M $3.00/M
Output price $15.00/M $15.00/M
Context window 200,000 1,000,000
Max output 8,192 64,000
Function calling
Vision
Audio input
Reasoning
Prompt caching
Structured output
Pricing verified May 7, 2026 May 12, 2026
Cheaper option
Larger context
1,000,000 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 Sonnet 4.6
1,466
HumanEvalcode
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
93.7%
Claude Sonnet 4.6
τ-bench (retail)agent
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Sonnet 4.6
91.7%
GPQA Diamondreasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
65.0%
Claude Sonnet 4.6
89.9%
MMLUgeneral
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
88.7%
Claude Sonnet 4.6
89.3%
SWE-bench Verifiedagent
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
49.0%
Claude Sonnet 4.6
79.6%
MMMU-Promultimodal
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Sonnet 4.6
74.5%
MMMUmultimodal
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
68.3%
Claude Sonnet 4.6
ARC-AGI-2reasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Sonnet 4.6
58.3%
Humanity's Last Examreasoning
Claude 3.5 Sonnet latest
Claude Sonnet 4.6
33.2%