Claude Sonnet 4.6, the Token Muncher
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.6 yesterday. The rumours from a few weeks ago were that the next model from the Sonnet family would be Sonnet 5, but here we are.
The main observation from the announcement is its improvement in computer use skills and performance in economically valuable office tasks (it is the #1 model in the Office tasks benchmark: GDPval-AA).
Personally, I was excited to see how similar it is to Opus 4.5 in the benchmarks, which means that we are getting Opus 4.5 level performance at the same cost of Sonnet 4.5 ($3/$15 per million tokens).
[...some early developers] often even prefer it [Sonnet 4.6] to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5
Experiment
I have always liked data visualization and I'm really enjoying using these models to generate visualizations for trends and datasets that I find interesting. Inspired by this post on r/dataisbeautiful, I wanted to check if Sonnet 4.6 could generate a similar one but for Indian states instead. So I launched a new Claude Code session with --dangerously-skip-permissions and gave it the following prompt:
Hey Claude, create a infographic image (maybe a line graph) showing the average male height by birth year in Indian states. You can use the internet to fetch the data that is required to create this image. Try to find the data from the oldest possible to the latest possible. Include the top 10 most interesting states in terms of trends (be sure to include AP). Make it look aesthetic. Include some text highlight one interesting trend. a Don’t ask me any questions. You should not complete until you’ve generated a image in the current directory for me to view.