Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Feb 2026) is the everyday default — near-flagship coding at ~40% lower cost and ~2x the speed of Opus, with a 1M-token context and tunable thinking.

Best for

• The default workhorse: near-flagship coding cheaply and fast
• Production agents and IDE coding assistants
• Tunable reasoning depth (extended/adaptive thinking)
• Long inputs with 1M context

How it compares — and the India angle

• Delivers ~99% of Opus's coding performance on most real tasks — the smart default before reaching for Opus.
• For budget-conscious Indian developers this is the sweet spot: flagship-class results without Opus pricing.
• Its science score (GPQA ~71) trails Opus — choose Opus when hard math/science is the bottleneck, not coding.