# Claude 3 Sonnet vs Claude Sonnet 4.5

> Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.0 to 28.8 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/claude-3-sonnet-vs-claude-sonnet-4-5
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 23

## Summary

- They share 23 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude 3 Sonnet scores higher in 0 categories and Claude Sonnet 4.5 in 9 categories; 9 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in knowledge, where Claude Sonnet 4.5 leads 48.4 to 21.1.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is MATH Level 5: 18.2% for Claude 3 Sonnet and 97.7% for Claude Sonnet 4.5.

## Snapshot

| | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Noometry Index | 28.8 | 44.0 |
| Rank | 311 | 76 |
| Context | — | 1M |
| Input $/M | — | $3 |
| Output $/M | — | $15 |
| Weights | Proprietary | Proprietary |

## Coding

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 29.2 (#296)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 47.8 (#54)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| WeirdML | 10.2% | 47.7% |
| LMArena Coding | 1223 | 1489 |
| SWE-bench Verified | — | 71.3% |
| SWE-bench Verified (bash only) | — | 71.4% |
| LMArena WebDev | — | 1393 |
| SWE-bench Multilingual | — | 67% |
| SciCode | — | 44.7% |
| GSO | — | 14.7% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 42.7% | — |
| BigCodeBench Complete | 53.8% | — |
| ALE-Bench | — | 796.15 |
| AlgoTune | — | 1.52 |
| HumanEval+ | 64% | — |
| MBPP+ | 69.3% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Claude 3 Sonnet: —
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 38.1 (#30)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | — | 46.5% |
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 73.2% |
| GDPval | — | 42.5% |
| Remote Labor Index | — | 2.1% |
| τ²-bench Airline | — | 72% |
| τ²-bench Banking | — | 25.3% |
| τ²-bench Retail | — | 72.4% |
| τ²-bench Telecom | — | 84.9% |
| Cybench | — | 60% |
| DeepResearch Bench | — | 52.6% |
| OSWorld | — | 62.9% |
| LMArena Search | — | 1159 |
| METR Time Horizons | — | 67.4% |
| Vending-Bench 2 | — | 3,839 |

## Reasoning

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 19.7 (#232)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 26.9 (#113)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1197 | 1462 |
| DTBench | 53.6% | 83.2% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 120.69 | 146.84 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | — | 13.6% |
| SimpleBench | — | 54.3% |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 57.9% |
| NYT Connections (extended) | — | 37.3% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | — | 63.7% |
| CritPt | — | 1.1% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 12% |
| EnigmaEval | — | 6% |
| EBR-Bench | — | 2.4% |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | — | 17% |
| LMCA | — | 38.8% |
| ForecastBench | — | 61.9 |
| WinoGrande | 75.1% | — |

## Math

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 10.0 (#305)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 31.9 (#190)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 2.5% | 77.8% |
| LMArena Math | 1213 | 1448 |
| MATH Level 5 | 18.2% | 97.7% |
| FrontierMath (Tiers 1-3) | — | 23.9% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 | — | 2.4% |
| ProofBench | — | 19% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 55.3% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 15.2% |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | — | 4.2% |

## Knowledge

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 21.1 (#271)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 48.4 (#70)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 40.6% | 82.3% |
| LMArena Expert | 1173 | 1483 |
| Humanity's Last Exam | — | 13.7% |
| SimpleQA Verified | — | 30.7% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 86.9% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 12% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 68.6% |
| MMLU | 75.9% | — |

## Multimodal

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 24.7 (#120)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 34.1 (#84)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 984 | — |
| VPCT | — | 39.8% |
| LMArena Document | — | 1450 |

## Multilingual

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 38.0 (#229)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 53.6 (#65)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1205 | 1425 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1188 | 1459 |
| LMArena French | 1228 | 1459 |
| LMArena German | 1204 | 1427 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1131 | 1390 |
| LMArena Korean | 1128 | 1403 |
| LMArena Russian | 1227 | 1436 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1204 | 1457 |

## Instruction Following

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 63.1 (#230)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 75.2 (#74)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1200 | 1459 |
| IFEval | — | 85% |

## Long Context

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 36.7 (#223)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 45.2 (#45)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1211 | 1476 |

## Writing & Preference

- Claude 3 Sonnet: 42.3 (#233)
- Claude Sonnet 4.5: 66.7 (#33)

| Benchmark | Claude 3 Sonnet | Claude Sonnet 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1218 | 1439 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1186 | 1442 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1227 | 1465 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 1678 |
| WildBench | — | 85.4% |

## FAQ

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet better than Claude Sonnet 4.5?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is the stronger model overall, scoring 44.0 to 28.8 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Claude 3 Sonnet or Claude Sonnet 4.5 better for coding?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 47.8 versus 29.2 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude Sonnet 4.5 share?

23 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude 3 Sonnet has 30 scored results on Noometry and Claude Sonnet 4.5 has 73.