Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
ZDNET's key takeaways
Claude Sonnet 4 now has one million context tokens.
As a result, the model can process much larger developer tasks.
Developers can access it now, but API pricing does increase for certain requests.
We all have that friend who is a great active listener and can recall details from past interactions, which then feeds into better conversations in the future. Similarly, AI models have context windows that impact how much content they can reference -- and Anthropic's Claude Sonnet just got a huge upgrade that should let it do a lot more for you.
Also: Microsoft Copilot 3D turns your 2D images into 3D models for free - how to try
Claude Sonnet 4 can now support up to one million tokens of context, marking a fivefold increase from the prior 200,000, Anthropic said on Tuesday. With this large context window, Claude Sonnet can process codebases with over 75,000 lines of code or dozens of research papers with a single API request.
The longer context window allows developers to use Claude for more data-heavy projects, such as large-scale code analysis and document synthesis, as mentioned above, but also context-aware agents that require a lot of material to operate complex workflows.
Anthropic describes Claude Sonnet as a "hybrid reasoning model with superior intelligence." ZDNET's own internal testing has found it to be a very capable model, even outperforming what Anthropic touted at the time as its most advanced coding model, Opus 4. Sonnet passed all four coding tests while Claude Opus failed two.
... continue reading