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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.
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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.
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Developers interested in trying the upgraded Sonnet 4 can access it in public beta on the Anthropic API as customers with Tier 4 and custom rate limits. It is also available on third-party cloud computing platforms, starting with Amazon Bedrock, and coming soon to Google Cloud's Vertex AI. The API pricing does increase for prompts over 200K tokens.
Since launching the Claude 4 models in May, Anthropic has been riding a wave of steady upward momentum. Claude Code, a fan favorite coding assistant that can be called on directly in a developer's workspace to write or manage code, shipped 10 features in the last month, and its highly anticipated Opus 4.1 was released last week. The company reports that its B2B run-rate revenue has grown 17 times YoY as of June 2025.
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