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Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Sonnet 4.6 brings Opus-approaching intelligence to the Sonnet tier with adaptive thinking, a context window of 1M tokens, strong agentic coding, frontend UI quality, and computer use accuracy improvements, plus MCP support for scaled tool use and interleaved thinking with tool calls.

File InputReasoningTool UseVision (Image)Explicit CachingWeb Search
index.ts
import { streamText } from 'ai'


const result = streamText({
  model: 'anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6',
  prompt: 'Why is the sky blue?'
})
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Frequently Asked Questions

  • How does adaptive thinking differ from the fixed thinking budgets in earlier models?

    The model decides when and how much to reason based on the request, rather than applying a developer-specified token budget. For mixed workloads with varying complexity, this avoids over-spending thinking tokens on simple requests while still applying deep reasoning to hard ones.

  • Does Claude Sonnet 4.6 have the context window of 1M tokens?

    Yes. The context window of 1M tokens is part of Sonnet 4.6's standard specification.

  • What does MCP support mean for tool use in Sonnet 4.6?

    MCP (Model Context Protocol) support lets the model interact with larger, standardized tool ecosystems without requiring individual tool specification per interaction. The model can proactively execute tasks, delegate to subagents, and parallelize tool calls.

  • Can Sonnet 4.6 interleave thinking and tool calls?

    Yes. Sonnet 4.6 can interleave thinking and tool calls within a single response, reasoning about a problem, calling a tool, reasoning about the result, and calling another tool, all in one turn.

  • How do I configure adaptive thinking and effort for Sonnet 4.6 in the AI SDK?

    Set the model to anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6. Under providerOptions.anthropic, pass an effort level (for example, medium) and thinking.type set to adaptive.

  • What does "Opus-approaching intelligence" mean practically for my use cases?

    Sonnet 4.6 narrows the gap between the Sonnet and Opus tiers. For tasks where Opus previously justified its higher cost, benchmark Sonnet 4.6 as a potentially equivalent alternative at lower per-token pricing.

  • What were the specific capability improvements in Sonnet 4.6 over previous Sonnet models?

    Agentic coding, code review, frontend UI generation, and higher-fidelity instruction following all improved. The model approaches Opus-level intelligence while maintaining Sonnet-tier cost and latency.