Claude Sonnet 4.6 introduces Anthropic's "extended thinking" capability — the model can optionally spend additional compute reasoning through complex problems before responding, similar to OpenAI's o-series. This makes it the go-to choice for tasks that span both everyday assistance and hard reasoning challenges.
Key capabilities
- Extended thinking — configurable thinking budget for hard problems (math, coding, analysis)
- Computer use — agentic GUI interaction for automating desktop tasks
- 200K context window — fits large codebases and long documents
- Vision — inspects and reasons over images
What it's best for
The primary model for Claude Code, long-horizon coding agents, research workflows requiring deep analysis, and enterprise automation. Replaces Claude 3.5 Sonnet for most production workloads.