Model comparison

Claude 3 Sonnet vs Claude Opus 4.6

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index.

Last verified . 23 shared benchmarks.

Claude 3 Sonnet Anthropic

29.0

Rank #319 Confirmed

Claude Opus 4.6 Anthropic

58.2

Rank #20 Confirmed

Summary

  • They share 23 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher in 0 categories and Claude Opus 4.6 in 9 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
  • The widest gap is in math, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 63.0 to 10.7.
  • The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 2.5% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 94.4% for Claude Opus 4.6.

Side by side

Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude Opus 4.6 specifications
Claude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
ProviderAnthropicAnthropic
Noometry Index29.058.2
Released2024-02-292026-02-04
WeightsProprietaryProprietary
Context window—1M
Max output—128K
Input $ / M tokens—$5
Output $ / M tokens—$25
Results tracked3068

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Category by category

Coding Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 29.6 (#302), Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20)

Coding benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
WeirdML10.2%78%
LMArena Coding12231536
SWE-bench Verified—78.7%
FrontierCode—26.6%
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)—75.6%
LMArena WebDev—1547
SWE-bench Multilingual—72%
GSO—41.2%
BigCodeBench Instruct42.7%—
BigCodeBench Complete53.8%—
ALE-Bench—996.5
AlgoTune—1.47
HumanEval+64%—
MBPP+69.3%—

Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable

Claude 3 Sonnet: —, Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4)

Agentic & Tool Use benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
Terminal-Bench—79.8%
APEX-Agents—46.3%
Remote Labor Index—4.2%
τ²-bench Banking—27.3%
Cybench—93%
DeepResearch Bench—55.3%
GBAEval—44.1%
LMArena Search—1253
METR Time Horizons—78.9%
Vending-Bench 2—8,018

Reasoning Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 20.5 (#237), Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23)

Reasoning benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
LMArena Hard Prompts11971527
DTBench53.6%91.2%
Epoch Capabilities Index120.7155.24
ARC-AGI-2—69.2%
SimpleBench—67.6%
Kagi LLM Benchmark—83.6%
NYT Connections (extended)—92.1%
ARC-AGI-1—94%
Chess Puzzles—17%
EnigmaEval—7.6%
Thematic Generalization—80.6%
EBR-Bench—12.7%
Mystery Game Puzzles—25%
LMCA—55.8%
ForecastBench—60
WinoGrande75.1%—

Math Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 10.7 (#310), Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31)

Knowledge Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 21.1 (#276), Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26)

Knowledge benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
GPQA Diamond40.6%90.5%
LMArena Expert11731546
Humanity's Last Exam—34.4%
SimpleQA Verified—47%
Vectara Hallucination Rate—12.2%
MMLU75.9%—

Multimodal Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 25.2 (#125), Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74)

Multimodal benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
LMArena Vision9841316
Furniture Assembly—28.3%
LMArena Document—1507

Multilingual Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 37.8 (#234), Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6)

Multilingual benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
LMArena Non-English12051489
LMArena Chinese11891551
LMArena French12291513
LMArena German12041502
LMArena Japanese11311484
LMArena Korean11281464
LMArena Russian12271497
LMArena Spanish12041510

Instruction Following Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 62.8 (#235), Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4)

Instruction Following benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
LMArena Instruction Following11991523

Long Context Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 36.7 (#228), Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13)

Long Context benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
LMArena Longer Query12111520
CL-bench—20.7%
CL-bench Life—17%

Writing & Preference Claude Opus 4.6 leads

Claude 3 Sonnet: 42.1 (#238), Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10)

Writing & Preference benchmarks
BenchmarkClaude 3 SonnetClaude Opus 4.6
LMArena Text12181503
LMArena Creative Writing11861505
LMArena Multi-Turn12271513
EQ-Bench Creative Writing—1809
EQ-Bench 4—1223

Frequently asked questions

Is Claude 3 Sonnet better than Claude Opus 4.6?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index.

Is Claude 3 Sonnet or Claude Opus 4.6 better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 29.6 in the Noometry coding category.

How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude Opus 4.6 share?

23 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Sonnet has 30 scored results on Noometry and Claude Opus 4.6 has 68.

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