claude-3.5-sonnet-20241022

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is Anthropic's most widely deployed model, delivering strong performance on coding tasks — particularly agentic coding workflows where the model must write, execute, and debug code across multiple steps. It supports a 200K-token context window, vision inputs, tool use (function calling), and streaming, and is available on Anthropic's API.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is priced at $3.00 per million input tokens and $15.00 per million output tokens. Prompt caching reduces repeated input to $0.30/1M — a 90% discount that is particularly valuable for long system prompts and document Q&A patterns. At 1,000 input + 500 output tokens per call, it costs approximately $0.0105 per 1,000 API calls. The 5:1 output-to-input ratio reflects Anthropic's pricing structure. For coding-heavy workloads where Claude 3.5 Sonnet's quality advantage is meaningful, the cost premium over GPT-4o is typically justified.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet's 200K-token context window enables analysis of very large codebases, lengthy legal documents, or extended research papers in a single call. Median latency is approximately 400–600ms TTFT under typical load, fast enough for interactive applications. Throughput is approximately 80 tokens per second. Maximum output is 8,192 tokens, which can be a constraint for long-form generation tasks. Anthropic's "extended output" beta (available on request) raises this limit to 64K tokens for specific use cases.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is best suited to coding tasks (it consistently ranks among the top models on agentic coding benchmarks), complex instruction following, long-document analysis, and applications requiring careful adherence to formatting and style guidelines. Its "computer use" capability (in beta) enables it to control desktop interfaces — clicking, typing, and navigating applications — making it uniquely suited to automation workflows that interact with GUIs. Tool use is reliable and well-documented, with support for parallel tool calls and complex multi-step agentic workflows. For customer-facing chat, its tone is notably more natural and less formulaic than GPT-4o, which some users prefer.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet sits in Anthropic's advanced tier, positioned between the faster/cheaper Claude 3.5 Haiku and the more capable Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Opus 4. On coding benchmarks, it remains competitive with newer models. Its main competitors are frontier-tier models from OpenAI and Google at similar price points — both support vision and function calling and are widely used in production. The key differentiator is task-specific; always benchmark with your specific workload before choosing between providers.