Anthropic on Tuesday released Claude Sonnet 4.6, a model that amounts to a seismic repricing event for the AI industry. It delivers near-flagship intelligence at mid-tier cost, and it lands squarely in the middle of an unprecedented corporate rush to deploy AI agents and automated coding tools.The model is a full upgrade across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design. It features a 1M token context window in beta. It is now the default model in claude.ai and Claude Cowork, and pricing holds steady at $3/$15 per million tokens — the same as its predecessor, Sonnet 4.5.That pricing detail is the headline that matters most. Anthropic’s flagship Opus models cost $15/$75 per million tokens — five times the Sonnet price. Yet 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. For the thousands of enterprises now deploying AI agents that make millions of API calls per day, that math changes everything.Why the cost of running AI agents at scale just dropped dramaticallyTo understand the significance of this release, you need to understand the moment it arrives in. The past year has been dominated by the twin phenomena of “vibe coding” and agentic AI. Claude Code — Anthropic’s developer-facing terminal tool — has become a cultural force in Silicon Valley, with engineers building entire applications through natural-language conversation. The New York Times profiled its meteoric rise in January. The Verge recently declared that Claude Code is having a genuine “moment.” OpenAI, meanwhile, has …
