Claude Sonnet 4.0 API — Balanced Intelligence for Production

Claude Sonnet 4.0 API is positioned as a high-performance, balanced model for production teams that need strong reasoning without premium cost. It is a practical default for customer support agents, document analysis, and developer copilots that must remain accurate and reliable at scale. The Claude Sonnet 4.0 API also fits teams that plan to add tool use, structured outputs, and long-context workflows over time, while keeping latency and spend predictable for day-to-day operations.

Claude Sonnet 4 is priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Prompt caching uses separate rates for cache writes and cache reads, and batch processing applies a 50% discount on input and output for asynchronous jobs. If you enable the 1M context beta and your request exceeds 200K input tokens, premium long-context rates apply. Always confirm current rates on the official pricing page before final budgeting.

Claude Sonnet 4 supports a 1M token context window in beta for organizations in usage tier 4 or with custom rate limits, and that 1M option is only available for Claude Sonnet 4 and 4.5. Requests above 200K input tokens are billed at premium long-context rates, while smaller prompts use standard pricing. This makes the Claude Sonnet 4.0 API a strong fit for large documents, long conversations, and multi-file reviews that would otherwise require chunking.

Yes. The Claude Sonnet 4.0 API supports tool use, and each tool definition includes an input_schema that follows JSON Schema to define parameters. This makes tool calls predictable, easier to validate, and safer to automate. Tool definitions and tool calls count toward token usage, so include them in cost estimates. For agents that must fetch data or trigger actions, schema-based tool inputs reduce parsing errors and improve reliability.

Prompt caching reduces cost for repeated context by separating cache write and cache read pricing. On the pricing page, 5-minute cache writes are 1.25x base input, 1-hour cache writes are 2x, and cache reads are 0.1x. This is useful when you reuse long system prompts, policies, or static documents across many requests. For high-volume workflows, caching can cut total spend while keeping response quality consistent.

Yes. Anthropic states that all current Claude models support text and image input, text output, multilingual capabilities, and vision. That means the Claude Sonnet 4.0 API can interpret screenshots, charts, or scanned documents and respond in multiple languages. If your workflow includes visual data, this keeps analysis and reporting in a single model rather than switching providers, which is helpful for global support and analytics teams.

Claude models are available via the Anthropic API and on third-party platforms including AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. This gives teams options for procurement, data residency, and infrastructure alignment. If you deploy across multiple platforms, standardize prompts and evaluation checks so the Claude Sonnet 4.0 API behaves consistently across regions and environments.