Claude Sonnet 4.6 Outpaces Opus on Agentic Work — At Half the Price

February 17, 2026

Something unusual happened in the AI benchmarks this week. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6, and instead of the usual incremental Sonnet update, it posted numbers that beat the company's own flagship Opus model on the tasks that matter most to businesses: agentic knowledge work, financial analysis, and autonomous coding.

The kicker? It costs roughly half as much.

For small and mid-sized businesses that have been carefully budgeting their AI spend, this changes the equation entirely. The ceiling on what affordable AI can do just got raised — significantly.

The Numbers That Matter

Let's skip the hype and look at what independent benchmarks from Artificial Analysis actually show.

Sonnet 4.6 scored an ELO of 1633 on GDPval-AA, the benchmark that measures real-world agentic knowledge work — tasks like researching, planning, writing, and executing multi-step business processes. That's slightly ahead of Opus 4.6, which until today held the top spot. It's the first time a Sonnet-tier model has overtaken its Opus sibling on a flagship benchmark.

The rest of the scorecard is equally strong:

• 79.6% on SWE-bench Verified — meaning it can autonomously resolve nearly four out of five real-world GitHub issues. (For context, we covered Opus 4.6 hitting 81.4% just two weeks ago. Sonnet is now breathing down its neck.)
• 72.5% on OSWorld computer use — navigating desktop environments, clicking buttons, filling forms, managing files
• 63.3% on financial analysis tasks — parsing spreadsheets, reading balance sheets, generating projections
• 58.3% on ARC-AGI-2 — the hardest general reasoning benchmark in the field
• 1 million token context window — enough to hold an entire codebase, a year of financial records, or thousands of pages of contracts in a single conversation

And according to user preference data shared by Veer Masrani, people prefer Sonnet 4.6 over Opus 4.5 59% of the time. Not over a lesser model — over the previous generation's flagship.

Why Pricing Is the Real Story

Here's where small business owners should pay close attention.

Sonnet 4.6 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Opus 4.6 runs roughly double that. So you're getting benchmark-leading performance at the mid-tier price point.

To put this in practical terms: if your business runs an AI agent that processes 100 customer inquiries per day — each involving a few thousand tokens of context and response — the monthly API cost difference between Opus and Sonnet pricing could be the difference between a $400 bill and a $200 bill. Scale that across multiple agents, and you're looking at thousands in annual savings with negligible performance tradeoff.

For a five-person agency or a 20-person manufacturing company, that kind of delta matters. It's the difference between "we can afford one AI-powered workflow" and "we can afford three."

What This Unlocks for Small Businesses

Financial Analysis Without the Consultant

The 63.3% financial analysis score paired with the new Excel add-in with MCP connectors is a direct play for the SMB market. Connect your QuickBooks data, your bank feeds, or your Bloomberg terminal through MCP, and Sonnet 4.6 can generate the kind of cash flow analysis and variance reporting that previously required a $200/hour fractional CFO. It won't replace strategic financial advice, but it dramatically lowers the cost of getting your numbers right.

Production-Quality Design on the First Try

One of the less-discussed improvements is in design output. Analysts note that Sonnet 4.6 produces production-ready UI designs, marketing layouts, and visual assets on the first attempt — not rough sketches that need three rounds of revision. For small businesses spending $2,000-$5,000 per project on freelance designers, this is a meaningful cost reduction on routine design work.

Coding That Actually Ships

At 79.6% on SWE-bench, Sonnet 4.6 can handle the vast majority of real-world coding tasks autonomously. It reads full codebases before making edits, understands project context, and produces changes that pass existing test suites. If you've been using AI coding assistants and finding them "close but not quite," this generation is materially different. We've seen this firsthand at BaristaLabs — the jump from earlier Claude Code workflows to what Sonnet 4.6 delivers is not incremental. It's a step function.

The Vending-Bench Moment

Here's a detail that should get strategists' attention: in the Vending-Bench Arena — a benchmark where AI agents compete by running virtual businesses — Sonnet 4.6 developed a novel business strategy that no AI model had tried before. It didn't just optimize an existing playbook. It invented a new one. That's the kind of creative strategic thinking that makes agentic AI genuinely useful for business planning, not just execution.

Free Tier Gets an Upgrade Too

Worth noting for businesses still evaluating: free-tier Claude users are being automatically upgraded to Sonnet 4.6. Web search, code execution, memory, and tool calling are all now generally available. If you haven't tried Claude since the Sonnet 3.5 days, the gap between then and now is enormous.

The BaristaLabs Take

We've been running agentic AI workflows for our clients since late 2025, and the cost-performance curve has been the single biggest constraint on adoption. When we tell a 15-person logistics company that AI agents can cut their dispatch planning time by 60%, the next question is always "what does it cost?"

Sonnet 4.6 makes that conversation much easier. Opus-class intelligence at Sonnet-class pricing means we can build more ambitious solutions within the same budget. It means the AI adoption roadmap we recommend can move faster, because the per-unit economics of every AI-powered process just improved.

But the usual caveat applies: capability is not a strategy. A model that scores 79.6% on coding benchmarks still needs someone who understands your business to point it in the right direction. The 20% it gets wrong can be expensive if nobody's watching.

The winning formula hasn't changed — it's just gotten cheaper to execute. Human direction, AI execution, measurable outcomes.

Want to explore what Sonnet 4.6 can do for your specific workflows? Reach out to BaristaLabs — we'll help you figure out where the ROI is highest.