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Blog/Model Picker/Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched June 2024 at $3/$15, beating Claude 3 Opus on MMLU, GPQA, HumanEval at a fifth of the cost. Specs, benchmarks, and code gains.

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Published Feb 2, 2026Model Picker hub

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the release where developers stopped defaulting to the biggest model. Anthropic shipped it on June 20, 2024, and from day one the pricing math flipped. A $3-input mid-tier model was scoring at or above the $15-input flagship on most public evals. Bigger stopped meaning better.

Key Specs

SpecDetails
API IDclaude-3-5-sonnet-20240620
Context window200K tokens
Input pricing$3 / 1M tokens
Output pricing$15 / 1M tokens
Release dateJune 20, 2024
Max output tokens8,192

What Landed With Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Top-tier smarts at a mid-tier price. Graduate-level reasoning, undergraduate knowledge, code generation. Across GPQA, MMLU, and HumanEval, this release held its own against Claude 3 Opus or scored above it. And it did so while the bill ran $3 input and $15 output per million tokens, next to the $15/$75 tier the flagship was charging. No model had paired those two things before.

Coding strength. This is the version that turned Claude into a real tool for writing code. The headline code score climbed from 55% on the flagship to 64% here. A lot of the developers still on GPT-4 for their code switched over during this window. Reasoning plus output quality made this the go-to choice for software engineering work.

Speed. Response rate landed at roughly 2x what the flagship was delivering. On an interactive coding session, a chat UI, or anywhere latency is the bottleneck, you felt it on the first request.

The "Sonnet is enough" moment. For a long time the rule of thumb was simple. Harder the problem, bigger the model. This release snapped that reflex. Teams who were paying Opus prices realized Sonnet got them to the same answer (or a better one) for one-fifth the bill. From that point on, picking a model started with Sonnet, not at the top of the menu.

Head-to-Head With Claude 3 Opus

BenchmarkClaude 3 OpusClaude 3.5 Sonnet
MMLU86.8%88.7%
GPQA50.4%59.4%
HumanEval55%64%
GSM8K95.0%96.4%

Every row favors the cheaper model. The table wrote its own argument.

The Missing Claude 3.5 Opus

At the 3.5 Sonnet launch, Anthropic also named a Claude 3.5 Opus on the roadmap. It never arrived. Claude 4 absorbed the whole 3.5 family before a bigger 3.5 felt necessary. With Sonnet putting up the numbers it did, the market never pushed hard for a top-tier 3.5.

Current Status

ModelStatus
Claude 3.5 Sonnet (v1)Superseded by v2 (October 2024)

A v2 took over in October 2024. It carried fresh gains on top of v1 and introduced Computer Use, a first for any frontier model.

Related Pages

  • All Claude Models for the full version timeline
  • Claude 3, the preceding generation
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2, the upgrade released October 2024 that added Computer Use

More in Model Picker

  • Claude Mythos: The Model That Thinks in Loops
    Claude Mythos is suspected to use recurrent-depth architecture: one shared layer looped N times, with ACT halting so hard questions get more passes and easy ones stop early.
  • Claude Opus 4.7 vs Other AI Models
    Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, Kimi K2.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V3.2: benchmarks, context windows, agent reliability, and cost, so you reach for the right one.
  • DeepSeek V4: Pricing, Context, and Migration
    DeepSeek V4 ships two models: V4-Flash at $0.28/M output and V4-Pro at $3.48/M. Both carry a genuine 1M context window and drop into any Anthropic-compatible SDK with one line changed.
  • Every Claude Model
    Every Claude model on one page: Claude 3, 3.5, 3.7, 4, Opus 4.1 to 4.6, Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6, Haiku 4.5. Specs, pricing, benchmarks, and when to use each.
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 and Claude 3.5 Haiku
    Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 and 3.5 Haiku launched October 2024 with Computer Use beta, cursor control, upgraded coding and tool use, and cheaper Haiku at $0.80/$4.
  • Claude 3.7 Sonnet
    Claude 3.7 Sonnet shipped February 2025 with hybrid reasoning and extended thinking. 64K output, thinking-budget control, SWE-bench coding gains at $3/$15.

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On this page

Key Specs
What Landed With Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Head-to-Head With Claude 3 Opus
The Missing Claude 3.5 Opus
Current Status
Related Pages

Stop configuring. Start building.

SaaS builder templates with AI orchestration.