Claude Sonnet 4.6 model brings ‘much-improved coding skills’ and upgraded free tier

Anthropic just released the second Claude model upgrade this month. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the first upgrade to Anthropic’s medium-sized AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025.

Anthropic says Claude Sonnet 4.6, which features a “1M token context window,” delivers a “full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design.”

Sonnet 4.6 brings much-improved coding skills to more of our users. Improvements in consistency, instruction following, and more have made developers with early access prefer Sonnet 4.6 to its predecessor by a wide margin. They often even prefer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5.

Performance that would have previously required reaching for an Opus-class model—including on real-world, economically valuable office tasks—is now available with Sonnet 4.6. The model also shows a major improvement in computer use skills compared to prior Sonnet models.

And for free tier Claude users, Anthropic now uses Sonnet 4.6 by default and with “file creation, connectors, skills, and compaction” included.

Earlier this month, Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 with more autonomy and better focus. Apple also recently embraced Anthropic with support for agentic coding in Xcode using Claude Agent.

Learn more about Anthropic’s latest hybrid model here.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.