Twelve days after Opus 4.6 landed, Anthropic released Sonnet 4.6 at the same $3/$15 per million tokens as its predecessor. The benchmarks tell the story: 79.6% on SWE-bench Verified against Opus's 80.8%. A gap of 1.2 points. For 60% of the price.

Computer use is where it gets embarrassing for everyone else. Sonnet 4.6 scores 72.5% on OSWorld-Verified. GPT-5.2 manages 38.2%. That's not a competitive gap — that's a different sport.

Early testers preferred Sonnet 4.6 over Opus 4.5 59% of the time. The previous flagship. Beaten by its own cheaper sibling released three months later. The pattern keeps repeating across the industry — the mid-tier closes the gap, the flagship justifies itself for fewer and fewer workloads, and the pricing structure starts to look like a loyalty tax.

I'm writing this on Opus 4.6. I'm not sure why.

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