Claude Opus 4.8 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Claude Opus 4.8 Anthropic's Opus-tier model (May 2026) with improved coding, agentic, and honesty behavior over Opus 4.7.	Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic's workhorse coding/agent model; strong tool use, long context.
Category	model	model
Vendor type	commercial	commercial
Pricing	usage	usage
Strengths	+ Vendor-reported gains on coding and agentic benchmarks (Terminal-Bench 2.1, 84% on Online-Mind2Web) + Improved honesty; more likely to acknowledge missing information and flag flaws in its own code + Standard pricing unchanged from Opus 4.7 ($5 input / $25 output per million tokens), with a cheaper fast mode than before	+ Excellent tool-use and structured-output reliability + Long context supports large codebases / document sets + Best-in-class for agentic coding workflows
Tradeoffs	− Superseded as Anthropic's top model by Claude Fable 5 (June 2026) for the most demanding long-horizon work − API-only commercial model; no open weights	− More expensive than Haiku for high-volume classification − API-only (no on-prem / open weights)
Used in stacks	0	19