AI foundation model maker Anthropic on Monday introduced Claude Sonnet 4.5, the latest iteration of its popular Claude line of generative AI models. It is designed to perform most effectively at coding, reasoning and computer use.
Anthropic said Sonnet 4.5 is suitable for building complex agents and is proficient at using computers — capable of working directly in a browser, navigating websites, filling out spreadsheets and completing tasks. The model is well-suited for applications in finance, research and cybersecurity, the vendor said.
Anthropic released the new model under the vendor’s AI Safety Level 3 protections, which include filters and classifiers that detect harmful inputs and outputs.
The vendor unveiled Sonnet 4.5 four months after it came out with Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, along with the Level 3 safety protections. The updated model arrives in a market in which agentic AI continues to grow and hold significance not only among vendors but also among enterprises.
The product release also comes the week after the vendor drew considerable attention when Microsoft picked Claude models to power the tech giant’s 365 Copilot generative AI platform, alongside models from Anthropic rival OpenAI.
Some Strengths
With Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic is seeking to remind the world that it has a powerful coding model, said Arun Chandrasekaran, an analyst at Gartner.
“In light of some of the recent competition … obviously from OpenAI and others … they’ve actually submitted a lot of benchmarks to illustrate that leadership,” Chandrasekaran said.
The vendor submitted the updated model to benchmarks such as OSWorld, which tests computer use, MMMLU for multilingual question and answer, and MMMU for visual reasoning.
Bradley Shimmin, an analyst with Futurum Group, said Anthropic is also trying to address a problem that has long plagued generative AI technology: AI safety and hallucinations.
“They’re trying to tackle some of these more systemic problems that we have with AI that the marketplace … is really overlooking right now,” Shimmin said.
Along with the model, Anthropic introduced new tools, including the Claude Agent SDK as well as a research preview it released Monday, Imagine with Claude.
With Imagine, Claude can generate software without the need for prewritten code, Anthropic said. The feature will be available to subscribers of Max, a high-tier subscription for Claude, for the next five days.
Key Challenges
One key challenge for Anthropic is building a go-to-market strategy around Sonnet 4.5 and its other new releases, Chandrasekaran said.
Anthropic has relied up to now largely on other software vendors to reach enterprise customers, he noted.
“I’ll be very intrigued to see how they build a more direct go-to-market approach, so that they can monetize the opportunities better, and they can have a higher margin market opportunity as well,” Chandrasekaran continued.
However, Shimmin said Anthropic might have no choice but to rely on its partners to survive in the turbulent generative AI market.
“As an independent, meaning they’re not a hyperscaler, Anthropic is at a disadvantage,” he said, noting that some frontier model makers are getting acquired as part of an industry consolidation. For example, Databricks acquired MosaicML in 2023.
Anthropic’s go-to-market strategy is similar to that of France-based Mistral AI. Anthropic is trying to build an ecosystem of developers that can build agentic tools and applications directly on Anthropic’s platform.
Shimmin added that the vendor seems to be focused less on acquiring users’ data and more on getting users to perform inference with its platform and charging them for it.
Some vendors have started integrating Sonnet 4.5. AI vendor Glean on Monday said it will support Sonnet 4.5 within its no-code agent builder.