February 17, 2026
Cheaper Opus or open-source panic?
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Cheaper 'almost-Opus', mega memory, and comment chaos
TLDR: Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 ships with a giant 1M-token memory and better “computer-using” skills at the same price. Commenters split between “cheaper near-Opus,” “not great for pure coding,” and “open-source-style rivals are catching up,” while many cheer the huge context—especially if it lands in Claude Code.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 just dropped, and the comment section lit up like a Friday night release. The pitch: bigger memory - a 1 million-token context that can hold whole codebases and contracts - plus sharper skills using a computer like a human, all at the same price. Anthropic claims near top-tier performance for many office tasks, and early devs say they prefer it to 4.5. One commenter summed up the mood with a wink: "Opus 4.6 but cheaper". Value play unlocked.
But the hot takes are spicy. Skeptics barked, "What happened to Sonnet 5?" while others went for the jugular: Anthropic is "running scared of open-weight models" and hyping safety before an IPO. The practical crowd countered with a shrug: might be worse than Opus for pure coding, but a win for people building assistants that click around apps for you. If that 1M context lands in Claude Code by default, devs say it's a game-changer.
Meanwhile, the "AI that uses a computer like you do" claim stirred debate. Anthropic cites OSWorld gains and better defenses against sneaky website instructions (see the docs). Fans joked it's a warm, funny spreadsheet intern; skeptics called it a therapy bot that tabs too much. Either way, the drama's premium - the price isn't.
Key Points
- •Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6 with upgrades in coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, and agent planning.
- •Sonnet 4.6 introduces a beta 1M-token context window and becomes the default model for Free and Pro users in claude.ai and Claude Cowork.
- •Pricing is unchanged from Sonnet 4.5 at $3/$15 per million tokens.
- •OSWorld benchmarks show steady computer-use gains; early users report human-level capability on certain tasks, though the model still lags top human users.
- •Safety evaluations indicate Sonnet 4.6 is as safe as or safer than recent models, with improved resistance to prompt injection and user preference over Sonnet 4.5 (~70% in Claude Code).