LLMs have gotten to the point where they're better at certain tasks than others. As such, it's not uncommon for people to have a toolbox of LLMs at their disposal, which they can pick and choose from depending on what they want to achieve. Personally, I go to Google Gemini when I want lifestyle tips, and I visit Claude when I want programming or technical advice.

If you, too, enjoy Claude's top-rated technical prowess, you're in luck. Anthropic has just announced the release of Claude Sonnet 4.6, and, despite making one of Claude's strongest points even stronger, you can give it a test at zero cost.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 arrives on all tiers, including the free one

Why not give it a go?

As announced on the Anthropic blog, the company has released Claude Sonnet 4.6 for everyone to use, regardless of their subscription tier. Claude was already one of the best LLMs for coding, and Anthropic claims it has made it even better with this update:

Sonnet 4.6 brings much-improved coding skills to more of our users. Improvements in consistency, instruction following, and more have made developers with early access prefer Sonnet 4.6 to its predecessor by a wide margin. They often even prefer it to our smartest model from November 2025, Claude Opus 4.5.

Performance that would have previously required reaching for an Opus-class model—including on real-world, economically valuable office tasks—is now available with Sonnet 4.6. The model also shows a major improvement in computer use skills compared to prior Sonnet models.

That doesn't mean that non-coders are left out, though. Anthropic claims that Claude Sonnet 4.6 features improvements "across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge work, and design." The best part is, this is more than just hot air coming from Anthropic. The company has benchmarks to prove the upgrade, and its improvements over Sonnet 4.5 look solid.

We're seeing an 8.1 percentage point improvement (59.1% vs. 51%) in agentic terminal coding, an 11.1 percentage point increase (72.5% vs. 61.4%) in agentic computer use, and a whopping 30.8 percentage point improvement (74.7% vs. 43.9%) in agentic search, to name a few.

If you want to give Claude Sonnet 4.6 a shot, you can take it for a spin over at the Claude AI website. Make sure that "Sonnet 4.6" is selected at the bottom-right of the input box, and you're good to go.