Claude 3.5 Sonnet
By Anthropic
5 Sonnet is a mid-tier large language model released by Anthropic in June 2024, and updated in October 2024, notable for outperforming the larger Claude 3 Opus on many benchmarks while introducing the experimental computer use capability…
Definition
Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a mid-tier large language model released by Anthropic in June 2024, and updated in October 2024, notable for outperforming the larger Claude 3 Opus on many benchmarks while introducing the experimental computer use capability for controlling a desktop environment.
Overview
Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched in June 2024 as the first model in Anthropic's 3.5 generation, and it quickly became notable for delivering Opus-level or better performance at Sonnet-tier speed and cost — a meaningful efficiency gain that let Anthropic offer strong capability without requiring the largest, most expensive tier. It improved substantially on coding tasks, agentic tool use, and visual reasoning compared to Claude 3, and became the default model behind Claude.ai and many developer integrations through much of 2024. In October 2024, Anthropic released an upgraded version (sometimes informally called "Claude 3.5 Sonnet (new)" or referenced by its model version date) alongside a new experimental feature called computer use, which let the model view a computer screen, move a cursor, click buttons, and type text to operate software the way a human would — a capability aimed at general computer-use agents rather than task-specific integrations. This same release window also introduced Claude 3.5 Haiku, a faster, cheaper model matching or exceeding the original Claude 3 Opus on some benchmarks. Claude 3.5 Sonnet supports a 200K-token context window, native vision input, and strong performance on software engineering benchmarks such as SWE-bench, which Anthropic highlighted as evidence of the model's suitability for coding assistants and agentic developer tools. It was made available through the Claude API, Claude.ai, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI, and served as an important bridge generation — demonstrating Anthropic's agentic and coding direction — before being succeeded by the Claude 4 family (including Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4) in 2025.
Key Features
- Outperformed the larger Claude 3 Opus on many benchmarks despite being a mid-tier model
- Introduced computer use, letting the model operate a desktop via screen, cursor, and keyboard control
- Strong software engineering performance, highlighted on benchmarks like SWE-bench
- 200K-token context window with native vision input
- Updated in October 2024 alongside the release of Claude 3.5 Haiku
- Became the default model behind Claude.ai for much of 2024
- Available via Claude API, Claude.ai, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud Vertex AI
Use Cases
Alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions
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