Model comparison
Claude Instant vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has enough public results to be ranked (#50); Claude Instant does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.
Last verified . 2 shared benchmarks.
Summary
- They share 2 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Instant scores higher in 0 categories and Claude Sonnet 4.6 in 1 category; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads 46.1 to 19.6.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is DTBench: 45.8% for Claude Instant and 89.9% for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
Side by side
| Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Noometry Index | 29.5 | 50.3 |
| Released | 2023-08-09 | 2026-02-17 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Context window | — | 1M |
| Max output | — | 128K |
| Input $ / M tokens | — | $3 |
| Output $ / M tokens | — | $15 |
| Results tracked | 7 | 57 |
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Category by category
Coding Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.3 (#67)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 75.2% |
| DeepSWE | — | 29.9% |
| FrontierCode | — | 24.3% |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1522 |
| SciCode | — | 46.8% |
| WeirdML | — | 66.1% |
| LMArena Coding | — | 1504 |
| ALE-Bench | — | 1,327 |
| HumanEval+ | 50.6% | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 39.1 (#28)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 53.4% |
| APEX-Agents | — | 43% |
| OSWorld 2.0 | — | 9.3% |
| DeepResearch Bench | — | 54.9% |
| OSWorld | — | 72.1% |
| ExploitBench | — | 23.6% |
| GBAEval | — | 48.8% |
| GDP.pdf | — | 18% |
| LMArena Search | — | 1221 |
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 7,204 |
Reasoning Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Instant: 19.6, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.1 (#45)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| DTBench | 45.8% | 89.9% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 120.28 | 152.24 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 60.4% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 80.9% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 86.5% |
| CritPt | — | 3.1% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 13% |
| Thematic Generalization | — | 76.3% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | — | 1484 |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 16% |
| LMCA | — | 46.5% |
| ForecastBench | — | 62 |
Math Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 52.9 (#49)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 85.8% |
| ProofBench | — | 45% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1462 |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 32.4% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 8.3% |
| GSM8K | 86.7% | — |
Knowledge Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 51.7 (#65)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | — | 87.4% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 35.5% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 10.6% |
| LMArena Expert | — | 1500 |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 86.3% | — |
| MMLU | 73.4% | — |
| TriviaQA | 78.9% | — |
Multimodal Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 38.0 (#68)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | — | 1283 |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | — | 6.7% |
| LMArena Document | — | 1482 |
Multilingual Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 54.4 (#41)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | — | 1440 |
| LMArena Chinese | — | 1491 |
| LMArena French | — | 1465 |
| LMArena German | — | 1428 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1420 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1411 |
| LMArena Russian | — | 1440 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1464 |
Instruction Following Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 77.4 (#25)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | — | 1475 |
Long Context Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 45.3 (#44)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | — | 1479 |
Writing & Preference Not comparable
Claude Instant: —, Claude Sonnet 4.6: 70.2 (#22)
| Benchmark | Claude Instant | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | — | 1458 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | — | 1435 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1810 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 1207 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | — | 1464 |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Instant better than Claude Sonnet 4.6?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has enough public results to be ranked (#50); Claude Instant does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.
How many benchmarks do Claude Instant and Claude Sonnet 4.6 share?
2 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Instant has 7 scored results on Noometry and Claude Sonnet 4.6 has 57.