Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5
Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is cheaper by 40% on average. Claude Opus 4.6 from Azure AI Foundry (200,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls) vs. Claude Sonnet 4.5 from Anthropic (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 Sonnet 4.5 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-sonnet-4-5
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 Opus 4.6 | Claude Sonnet 4.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Input price | $5.00/M | $3.00/M |
| Output price | $25.00/M | $15.00/M |
| Context window | 200,000 | 200,000 |
| Max output | 128,000 | 64,000 |
| Function calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio input | — | — |
| Reasoning | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt caching | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured output | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pricing verified | May 12, 2026 | May 12, 2026 |
Benchmark comparison
Side-by-side public benchmark scores. Greener bar = winner.
Chatbot Arena ELOgeneral
Claude Opus 4.6
1,502
Claude Sonnet 4.5
1,454
AIME 2025math
Claude Opus 4.6
—
Claude Sonnet 4.5
100.0%
τ-bench (retail)agent
Claude Opus 4.6
91.9%
Claude Sonnet 4.5
75.4%
GPQA Diamondreasoning
Claude Opus 4.6
91.3%
Claude Sonnet 4.5
84.4%
SWE-bench Verifiedagent⚠ different settings
Claude Opus 4.6
81.4%
Claude Sonnet 4.5
82.0%
Humanity's Last Examreasoning
Claude Opus 4.6
53.0%
Claude Sonnet 4.5
—