# Claude 3 Sonnet vs Claude Opus 4.6

> Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-3-sonnet-vs-claude-opus-4-6
- Last updated: 2026-10-12
- Shared benchmarks: 23

## Summary

- They share 23 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher in 0 categories and Claude Opus 4.6 in 9 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in math, where Claude Opus 4.6 leads 63.0 to 10.7.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025: 2.5% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 94.4% for Claude Opus 4.6.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Noometry Index | 29.0 | 58.2 |
| Rank | 319 | 20 |
| Context | — | 1M |
| Input $/M | — | $5 |
| Output $/M | — | $25 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 29.6 (#302)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.2 (#20)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 10.2% | 78% |
| LMArena Coding | 1223 | 1536 |
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 78.7% |
| FrontierCode | — | 26.6% |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 75.6% |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1547 |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | — | 72% |
| GSO | — | 41.2% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 42.7% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 53.8% | — |
| ALE-Bench | — | 996.5 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.47 |
| HumanEval+ | 64% | — |
| MBPP+ | 69.3% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 3 Sonnet: —
- Claude Opus 4.6: 51.1 (#4)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 79.8% |
| APEX-Agents | — | 46.3% |
| Remote Labor Index | — | 4.2% |
| τ²-bench Banking | — | 27.3% |
| Cybench | — | 93% |
| DeepResearch Bench | — | 55.3% |
| GBAEval | — | 44.1% |
| LMArena Search | — | 1253 |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 78.9% |
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 8,018 |

## Reasoning

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 20.5 (#237)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.8 (#23)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1197 | 1527 |
| DTBench | 53.6% | 91.2% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 120.7 | 155.24 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 69.2% |
| SimpleBench | — | 67.6% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 83.6% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 92.1% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 94% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 17% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 7.6% |
| Thematic Generalization | — | 80.6% |
| EBR-Bench | — | 12.7% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 25% |
| LMCA | — | 55.8% |
| ForecastBench | — | 60 |
| WinoGrande | 75.1% | — |

## Math

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 10.7 (#310)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 63.0 (#31)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.5% | 94.4% |
| LMArena Math | 1213 | 1519 |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 66% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 26.8% |
| MathArena Final-Answer Competitions | — | 78.5% |
| ProofBench | — | 50% |
| MATH Level 5 | 18.2% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 40.7% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 22.9% |

## Knowledge

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 21.1 (#276)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 61.9 (#26)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 40.6% | 90.5% |
| LMArena Expert | 1173 | 1546 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 34.4% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 47% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 12.2% |
| MMLU | 75.9% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 25.2 (#125)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 37.3 (#74)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 984 | 1316 |
| Furniture Assembly | — | 28.3% |
| LMArena Document | — | 1507 |

## Multilingual

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 37.8 (#234)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 57.9 (#6)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1205 | 1489 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1189 | 1551 |
| LMArena French | 1229 | 1513 |
| LMArena German | 1204 | 1502 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1131 | 1484 |
| LMArena Korean | 1128 | 1464 |
| LMArena Russian | 1227 | 1497 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1204 | 1510 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 62.8 (#235)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 79.5 (#4)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1199 | 1523 |

## Long Context

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 36.7 (#228)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 48.1 (#13)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1211 | 1520 |
| CL-bench | — | 20.7% |
| CL-bench Life | — | 17% |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 42.1 (#238)
- Claude Opus 4.6: 73.5 (#10)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Opus 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1218 | 1503 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1505 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1227 | 1513 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1809 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | — | 1223 |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet better than Claude Opus 4.6?

Claude Opus 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 58.2 to 29.0 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet or Claude Opus 4.6 better for coding?

Claude Opus 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 57.2 versus 29.6 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude Opus 4.6 share?

23 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Sonnet has 30 scored results on Noometry and Claude Opus 4.6 has 68.