Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Llama 3.1 405B
How do these models stack up? Below is an expert side-by-side comparison of specifications, context window capacity, live pricing per million tokens, and standardized benchmark scores for Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Llama 3.1 405B.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's most capable Sonnet-class model yet, with frontier performance across coding, agents, and professional work. It excels at iterative development, complex codebase navigation, end-to-end project management with...
Llama 3.1 405B
Llama 3.1 405B is Meta's largest open-weight language model and one of the most capable openly available models in the world. With 405 billion parameters, it achieves performance competitive with GPT-4 and Claude Opus across benchmarks spanning general knowledge, mathematics, coding, and multilingual tasks. Llama 3.1 405B is released under Meta's custom commercial license, supporting broad use cases including deployment via major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and self-hosted inference with multi-GPU configurations.
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Llama 3.1 405B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Meta |
| Context Window | 1,000,000 tokens | 131,072 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | 94/100 | 90/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | 350 ms | 550 ms |
| Deployment Model | managed api | self hostable |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2026-02-17 | 2024-07-23 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Claude Sonnet 4.6
$3.00
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Output Price per Million Tokens
Claude Sonnet 4.6
$15.00
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
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Benchmark Performance Metrics
Scores show the raw performance percentages verified across key evaluation suites. Higher bars indicate superior accuracy and capability in that domain.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Best balance of speed and capability — default for most Claude integrations
- ▸Computer-use (beta) feature enables autonomous UI interaction
Llama 3.1 405B Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Massive model — requires 8× A100 80GB for FP16 inference
- ▸Available via Together AI, Fireworks, and Bedrock as managed API