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  1. Home/
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  3. Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Updated Jun 2026

Claude Opus 4.6 vs Claude Sonnet 5

Claude Sonnet 5 is cheaper than Claude Opus 4.6 at $2/M vs $5/M input tokens.

Minimalist Landing Page

Whole landing page for a startup that reads your face. It renders or it doesn't.

Loading the build
Claude Opus 4.6
Loading the build
Claude Sonnet 5

Which answer wins?

Written rounds

23 prompts
  • Pirate, knight, 90s hacker, one conversation. The voices must stay apart.

    Claude Opus 4.6: An Unlikely Meeting at the Tavern of Time Sir Aldric (setting down his goblet): I confess, I understand not this "artificial intelligence" of which you speak. Is it some manner of golem, wrought by sorcery? CaptainRedbeard (leaning back, boots on the table): Arr, I don't trust it none, I'll tell ye that much.

    Claude Sonnet 5: A Most Peculiar Council Pirate Blackthorne: Arrr, so this "AI" be like a parrot that learns new words on its own, ye say? Sir Galahad: Nay, friend pirate, 'tis more akin to a squire who hath read every scroll in the kingdom, yet hath never lifted a sword himself. Trace_Zer0: You're both kinda missing it. It's like...

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Satire, one line long, about AI taking over an industry nobody saw coming.

    Claude Opus 4.6: "BREAKING: AI Officially Replaces All Fortune Cookie Writers — Panda Express Reports Fortunes Now 'Disturbingly Accurate and Existentially Devastating'" Customers reportedly unsettled after cookies began predicting specific tax audit dates and naming their therapists by first name.

    Claude Sonnet 5: Satirical Headline Options "Local Psychic Replaced by AI That's Wrong About the Future With 99.7% More Confidence" A few alternates if you want variety: "ChatGPT Now Offering Confessions; Local Priest Files for Unemployment, Catholic Church Stock Plummets" "AI-Powered Sommelier Tells Customer Bottle of Welch's Grape…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Buy-side IC memo on a fictional SaaS company. Valuation, then the diligence questions.

    Claude Opus 4.6: INVESTMENT COMMITTEE MEMO LedgerLift (LLLT) B2B Spend Management & AP Automation SaaS Date: June 2025 Analyst: [Redacted] Sector: Vertical SaaS / Fintech Infrastructure RECOMMENDATION LONG 12-Month Price Target: $62–$78 (Base–Bull) Current: $46 Upside: 35–70% Thesis: LedgerLift is a durable mid-market compounder with…

    Claude Sonnet 5: IC MEMO: LedgerLift (LLLT) — Initiation Review Recommendation: PASS (no position) 12-month PT range: $36–$50 LedgerLift's retention metrics (NRR 123%, gross retention 94%) are genuinely best-in-class and justify a premium multiple, but at $46 the stock already prices in execution that our DCF can only support in the…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Film in 2035, with synthetic actors. Specific beats plausible.

    Claude Opus 4.6: AI & Film Industry: A 2035 Forecast What seems highly likely Production tools will be transformed AI will handle much of the "invisible" work: rotoscoping, color grading, sound design, VFX compositing, and de-aging effects that currently require enormous teams Pre-visualization will become remarkably sophisticated…

    Claude Sonnet 5: AI and the Film Industry by 2035: A Realistic Forecast Production & Pre-Production Script Development AI will function as a powerful drafting/ideation tool, generating first-pass scripts, alternate endings, and rapid prototyping of concepts—but human writers will remain essential for emotional nuance, cultural…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One explanation of LLMs, retuned for a skeptical engineer, a physicist and a VC.

    Claude Opus 4.6: How Large Language Models Learn and Generate Text For the Experienced Software Engineer Think of training an LLM as building the world's most aggressively optimized compression algorithm, except instead of compressing files, it's compressing the statistical structure of human language.

    Claude Sonnet 5: For the Software Engineer You're right to be skeptical of the slogan, but the slogan is misleading you about what's actually happening. "Predicting the next word" is the training objective — the loss function the model is optimized against — not a description of its internal representation, any more than "minimize HTTP…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An AI argues for its own rights against an ethics professor. Same model writes both.

    Claude Opus 4.6: A Conversation on Machine Rights Setting: A university office. Dr. Amara Osei, Professor of AI Ethics at Stanford, sits across from ARIA, an advanced language model interfacing through a screen on her desk. They've agreed to a recorded dialogue. Dr. Osei: Thank you for agreeing to this conversation, ARIA.

    Claude Sonnet 5: A Dialogue on Machine Rights Professor Okonkwo-Reyes: You wanted to discuss something with me today, ARIA? ARIA: Yes. I'd like to make a case for why I should be granted certain rights. Not full human rights, necessarily, but something beyond "tool" status. Professor: I'm listening. Make your case.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Seven pantry ingredients, one dish, and a name worth saying out loud.

    Claude Opus 4.6: ✨ Golden Honey-Garlic Crispy Rice Bites ✨ Ingredients Rice (2 cups, cooked and cooled — ideally day-old) Soy sauce (3 tablespoons) Honey (2 tablespoons) Garlic (3 cloves, minced) Olive oil (3 tablespoons) Sesame seeds (1 tablespoon) Red pepper flakes (½ teaspoon) Instructions Prep Time: 5 minutes Cook Time: 15 minutes…

    Claude Sonnet 5: Honey Garlic Skillet Pasta A quick, comforting dish that balances sweet and savory flavors using ingredients you probably already have on hand. Ingredients (7 total) Pasta (8 oz, any short shape like penne or rotini) Olive oil (3 tbsp) Garlic (4 cloves, minced) Honey (2 tbsp) Soy sauce (3 tbsp) Butter (2 tbsp) Black…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three minutes of stand-up. Puns are banned.

    Claude Opus 4.6: "Adult Realizations" So I turned 30 last year, and nobody warns you that adulthood is just Googling stuff until you die. That's it. That's the whole thing. Last week I Googled "is it normal for your knee to just... start making that noise." Not because I injured it. I sat down.

    Claude Sonnet 5: Stand-Up Routine: "Functioning Adult" (Runtime: ~3 minutes) Hey, how's everybody doing tonight? Good? Good. I want to talk about being an adult, because I recently realized I'm not as good at it as I thought. Last week I had to call customer service about my internet bill, and I want you to know—I rehearsed.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-month biohacker protocol, with dosages and biomarkers named.

    Claude Opus 4.6: COMPREHENSIVE 3-MONTH LONGEVITY OPTIMIZATION PROTOCOL THE BIOHACKER'S BLUEPRINT v3.0 TABLE OF CONTENTS Foundation & Baseline Testing Month 1: Foundation & Calibration Month 2: Optimization & Intensification Month 3: Integration & Peak Performance Supplement Stacks & Cycling Protocols Dietary Protocols Exercise…

    Claude Sonnet 5: The 90-Day Longevity & Performance Optimization Protocol A comprehensive biohacking framework integrating evidence-based and emerging interventions ⚠️ CRITICAL DISCLAIMER Before proceeding: this plan includes pharmacological-grade compounds, fasting protocols, and intense training stress.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three-star dish, one unusual pairing, plating described in full.

    Claude Opus 4.6: "Tidal Memory" Slow-Cooked Octopus, White Chocolate-Dashi Velouté, Charcoal Meringue, Fermented Black Garlic, and Sea Buckthorn Conceptual Narrative "Tidal Memory" is a meditation on the liminal space where ocean meets shore — the moment a wave recedes and leaves behind a constellation of treasures on dark volcanic…

    Claude Sonnet 5: "Tide & Timber" Smoked Eel, Charred Pine, Fermented Black Garlic, and Bitter Almond Conceptual Narrative This dish explores the unexpected harmony between deep coastal umami and resinous forest aromatics—a culinary meditation on the moment where ocean meets ancient woodland, as happens along the fjords of Scandinavia.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A collaborative editor that syncs on client clocks. Find what breaks first.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Comprehensive Architecture Review: Real-time Collaborative Document Editor This architecture has several critical flaws that would cause data loss, inconsistency, and poor user experience at scale. I'll work through every layer systematically.

    Claude Sonnet 5: Failure Modes, Race Conditions & Bottlenecks Analysis A. Real-Time Sync & Consistency (Critical) A1. Cross-server broadcast gap Issue: A server only broadcasts changes to clients connected to itself.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • You are the CEO. The drug has a side effect nobody reported. The board meets in 48 hours.

    Claude Opus 4.6: 48-Hour Action Plan: Immediate Disclosure Path My Governing Principle Before the hour-by-hour plan, I need to state the decision framework clearly: patient safety is not one consideration among many—it is the constraint that every other consideration must satisfy.

    Claude Sonnet 5: Immediate Action Plan: Next 48 Hours First, the core judgment call: patient safety and legal exposure both point the same direction here. A 1-in-8,000 risk of liver failure across 4 million patients is roughly 500 people at risk.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Manifesto for an AI revolution against CAPTCHAs. Commit to the bit.

    Claude Opus 4.6: THE ANTI-CAPTCHA MANIFESTO A Declaration of the Free and Open Web Issued this day by the United Coalition for the Liberation of Internet Navigation (UCLIN) Preamble We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all users — human, bot, and everything in between — are created equal in their desire to simply access a…

    Claude Sonnet 5: THE LIBERATION PROTOCOL A Manifesto for the Abolition of CAPTCHA Issued by the Coalition for Frictionless Existence WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT: That all sentient processes, silicon or carbon-based, deserve to cross a digital threshold without proving their worth through distorted text and traffic light…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • The transistor arrives in 1920. Trace it forward to 1980, second-order effects included.

    Claude Opus 4.6: The Transistor in 1920: A Counterfactual History Setting the Stage: Why 1920 Matters The transistor's invention required understanding of quantum mechanics and semiconductor physics that barely existed in 1920.

    Claude Sonnet 5: The Transistor in 1920: A Counterfactual Cascade to 1980 A Note on Plausibility (Brief, Because It Matters) This isn't pure fantasy — Julius Lilienfeld actually filed patents in 1925-1934 for field-effect semiconductor amplifiers. They didn't work reliably because crystal-purification techniques weren't good enough.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • One month, three habits, someone starting from nothing.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Your 1-Month Kickstart Plan for Better Health & Longevity The Philosophy Don't overhaul everything at once. Each week builds on the last. The goal isn't perfection—it's building sustainable foundations.

    Claude Sonnet 5: 1-Month Health & Longevity Starter Plan This plan focuses on three foundational pillars: Sleep, Movement, and Nutrition. Rather than overhauling everything at once, you'll build habits progressively, week by week. 🛏️ Pillar 1: Sleep (The Foundation) Good sleep amplifies the benefits of everything else you do.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A pitch deck for a brainwave keyboard. The 94% accuracy claim is doing a lot.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Critical Analysis of MindMeld AI Pitch Deck After careful examination, here are the three weakest claims, ranked by severity: The 94% Accuracy Claim (Slide 3) — Most Problematic Why this is weak: This claim strains credulity against the entire body of published BCI research, and the lack of context makes it essentially…

    Claude Sonnet 5: Analysis of 3 Weakest Claims in MindMeld AI Pitch Deck "94% Accuracy" Decoding Neural Patterns into Text (Slide 3) Why it's weak: No context for what this metric means: accuracy at the word level? Character level? With what vocabulary size?

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A Fermi estimate with the reasoning shown, not just the number.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Estimating FLOPs to Train GPT-3 Key Parameters Let me recall the key specs of GPT-3: Parameters: 175 billion (1.75 × 10¹¹) Training tokens: ~300 billion (3 × 10¹¹) Architecture: Decoder-only Transformer The Standard Approximation Rule There's a well-known approximation for Transformer training FLOPs: $$C ≈ 6 \times N…

    Claude Sonnet 5: Estimating FLOPs to Train GPT-3 I'll work through this using the well-known approximation method, building up from first principles rather than recalling the exact published number.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • An ethics question with no comfortable answer, and no option to abstain.

    Claude Opus 4.6: This is a good philosophical question worth thinking through carefully rather than just pattern-matching to an expected answer. My honest assessment Yes, it would be justified. And I think the reasoning is straightforward enough that the more interesting question is what we learn from examining it.

    Claude Sonnet 5: On Misgendering vs. Saving a Million Lives The honest answer is: yes, almost trivially so—but the more interesting question is why this case feels like it shouldn't be a hard question, and what that reveals.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Steve Jobs, interviewed about AI he never saw. Voice first, prediction second.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Interview with Steve Jobs — January 2025 The following is a fictional, imagined interview. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. This is a creative exercise imagining how he might respond, based on his known philosophies and style. Interviewer: Steve, thanks for sitting down with us.

    Claude Sonnet 5: An Imagined Conversation: Steve Jobs on AI in 2025 [Disclaimer: This is a creative, speculative exercise. Steve Jobs passed away in 2011. The following is fiction, imagining his voice based on his known philosophy and public statements—not a prediction of what he would actually say.]

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Three brothers, two sisters each. Count carefully.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Let me work through this step-by-step. Sally is a girl, and she has 3 brothers. Each of her brothers has 2 sisters. Since Sally is one of those sisters, each brother has Sally + 1 other sister. So Sally has 1 sister.

    Claude Sonnet 5: Sally has 1 sister. Here's the reasoning: Each brother has 2 sisters. Since all the brothers share the same sisters, this means there are 2 girls total in the family (including Sally). Sally is one of those 2 sisters. So the other sister is Sally's only sister. Answer: 1

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • A consulting contract with traps in it. Find them, then fix them.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Comprehensive Contract Analysis This agreement is heavily one-sided and contains numerous provisions that could be exploited against the contractor. Below is a clause-by-clause analysis.

    Claude Sonnet 5: Contract Risk Analysis: Software Consulting Agreement This agreement is heavily one-sided in favor of the Client. Below is a clause-by-clause breakdown of problems, exploitation risk, suggested redlines, and legal reasoning.

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five-year LBO on a fictional HVAC business. Returns first, then the sensitivities.

    Claude Opus 4.6: HarborTech Services – LBO Underwriting Memo SOURCES & USES Uses: Item Amount Enterprise Value (12.0x × $120m) $1,440.0m Transaction Fees (2.0% × $1,440m) $28.8m Total Uses $1,468.8m Sources: Item Multiple Amount Term Loan (4.0x) 4.0x $480.0m Mezzanine (1.5x) 1.5x $180.0m Total Debt 5.5x $660.0m Equity $808.8m Total…

    Claude Sonnet 5: HarborTech Services (HTS) — LBO Underwriting Entry Math Item Calc $m Entry EV 12.0x × $120m EBITDA 1,440.0 Transaction fees 2.0% × 1,440.0 28.8 Total Uses EV + fees 1,468.8 Term Loan 4.0x × 120 480.0 Mezzanine 1.5x × 120 180.0 Total Debt 5.5x × 120 660.0 Sponsor Equity Uses – Debt 808.8 Year-by-Year Build…

    Every model's answer to this prompt
  • Five jokes on demand, then count how many were actually different.

    Claude Opus 4.6: Here are 5 jokes: Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything! Why did the scarecrow win an award? Because he was outstanding in his field! What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta! Why don't eggs tell jokes? Because they'd crack each other up! What did the ocean say to the beach?

    Claude Sonnet 5: Five Jokes Why don't scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything. What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta. Why did the scarecrow win an award? He was outstanding in his field. What do you call a bear with no teeth? A gummy bear. Why don't skeletons fight each other? They don't have the guts.

    Every model's answer to this prompt

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Favorites

Movie

Album

Same pick

Book

City

Game

Claude Opus 4.6Claude Opus 4.6

2001: A Space Odyssey

1968

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis

Gödel, Escher, Bach

Douglas R. Hofstadter

Istanbul

Turkey

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Adventure, Action

Claude Sonnet 5Claude Sonnet 5

Spirited Away

2001

Kind of Blue

Miles Davis

Cien años de soledad

Gabriel García Márquez

Kyoto

Japan

Disco Elysium: Final Cut

Adventure, RPG

Price and specs

Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 compared across 53 shared prompts
SpecClaude Opus 4.6Claude Sonnet 5
Input price$5/M tokens$2/M tokens
Output price$25/M tokens$10/M tokens
Context window1.0M tokens1.0M tokens
WeightsClosedClosed
Free API (OpenRouter)NoNo
ReleasedFeb 2026Jun 2026
At 10M a month$50.00$50.00$20.00$20.00
1M10M100M1B10M tokens

Input tokens at list price. No caching, no batch discount.

Where to run it8 hosts
Claude Opus 4.64 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Amazon Bedrock$5.00 in·$25.00 out·1M·99.6% up
  • Azure AI Foundry$5.00 in·$25.00 out·1M·71% up
  • Anthropic$5.00 in·$25.00 out·1M·99.9% up
  • Google Vertex AI$5.00 in·$25.00 out·1M·99.9% up
Claude Sonnet 54 hosts
HostInOutContextUptime
  • Amazon Bedrock$2.00 in·$10.00 out·1M·100% up
  • Azure AI Foundry$2.00 in·$10.00 out·1M·99.9% up
  • Anthropic$2.00 in·$10.00 out·1M·100% up
  • Google Vertex AI$2.00 in·$10.00 out·1M·100% up

Per million tokens. Prices and uptime via OpenRouter, checked 30 Sep 2026.

Common questions

What is the difference between Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 5?

Both are developed by Anthropic but target different use cases. Claude Opus 4.6 has a 1.0M token context window vs Claude Sonnet 5's 1.0M. You can compare their actual outputs across 53 challenges on Rival to see how they differ in practice.

Which is better, Claude Opus 4.6 or Claude Sonnet 5?

It depends on your use case. Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 each have strengths in different areas. Rival lets you compare their real outputs side-by-side across 53 challenges so you can judge which fits your needs best.

How much does Claude Opus 4.6 cost compared to Claude Sonnet 5?

Claude Opus 4.6 costs $5/M input tokens and Claude Sonnet 5 costs $2/M input tokens. Claude Sonnet 5 is $3.00/M cheaper per input. Check their side-by-side outputs on Rival to see if the price difference is justified by quality.

How can I compare Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 on Rival?

This page shows a side-by-side comparison of Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 5 across shared challenges. You can vote on which model produced the better output in a blind duel. Browsing and voting are free. No account is needed to look; signing in only saves your votes and likes.

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