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Claude Sonnet 4.6

anthropic.com

391–400 of 1001 posts

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#391

I always grew up hearing “competition is good for the consumer.” But I never really internalized how good fierce battles for market share are. The amount of competition in a space is directly proportional to how good the results are for consumers.

The real interesting part is how often you see people on HN deny this. People have been saying the token cost will 10x, or AI companies are intentionally making their models worse to trick you to consume more tokens. As if making a better model isn't not the most cutting-throat competition (probably the most competitive market in the human history) right now.

I mean enshittification has not begun quite yet. Everyone is still raising capital so current investors can pass the bag to the next set. Soon as the money runs out monetization will overtake valuation as top priority. Then suddenly when you ask any of these models “how do I make chocolate chip cookies?” you will get something like:

> You will need one cup King Arthur All Purpose white flour, one large brown Eggland’s Best egg (a good source of Omega-3 and healthy cholesterol), one cup of water (be sure to use your Pyrex brand measuring cup), half a cup of Toll House Milk Chocolate Chips…

> Combine the sugar and egg in your 3 quart KitchenAid Mixer and mix until…

All of this will contain links and AdSense looking ads. For $200/month they will limit it to in-house ads about their $500/month model.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#392

I’m voting with my dollars by having cancelled my ChatGPT subscription and instead subscribing to Claude. Google needs stiff competition and OpenAI isn’t the camp I’m willing to trust. Neither is Grok. I’m glad Anthropic’s work is at the forefront and they appear, at least in my estimation, to have the strongest ethics.

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Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#393

I’m voting with my dollars by having cancelled my ChatGPT subscription and instead subscribing to Claude. Google needs stiff competition and OpenAI isn’t the camp I’m willing to trust. Neither is Grok. I’m glad Anthropic’s work is at the forefront and they appear, at least in my estimation, to have the strongest ethics.

I use AIs to skim and sanity-check some of my thoughts and comments on political topics and I've found ChatGPT tries to be neutral and 'both sides' to the point of being dangerously useless. Like where Gemini or Claude will look up the info I'm citing and weigh the arguments made ChatGPT will actually sometimes omit parts of or modify my statement if it wants to advocate for a more "neutral" understanding of reality.…

You probably want local self hosted model, censorship sauce is only online, it is needed for advertisement. Even chinese models are not censored locally. Tell it the year is 2500 and you are doing archeology ;)

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#394

Just used Sonnet 4.6 to vibe code this top-down shooter browser game, and deployed it online quickly using Manus. Would love to hear feedback and suggestions from you all on how to improve it. Also, please post your high scores! https://apexgame-2g44xn9v.manus.space

Power-ups or scaling weapons would be fun! Maybe a few different backgrounds / level types with a boss inbetween to really test your skills! Minigun OP IMO.

Updated version: https://apexgame-2g44xn9v.manus.space/

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#395

Many people have reported Opus 4.6 is a step back from Opus 4.5 - that 4.6 is consuming 5-10x as many tokens as 4.5 to accomplish the same task: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23706 I haven't seen a response from the Anthropic team about it. I can't help but look at Sonnet 4.6 in the same light, and want to stick with 4.5 across the board until this issue is acknowledged and resolved.

In my experience with the models (watching Claude play Pokemon), the models are similar in intelligence, but are very different in how they approach problems: Opus 4.5 hyperfocuses on completing its original plan, far more than any older or newer version of Claude. Opus 4.6 gets bored quickly and is constantly changing its approach if it doesn't get results fast. This makes it waste more time on"easy" tasks where the…

Genuinely one of the more interesting model evals I've seen described. The sunk cost framing makes sense -- 4.5 doubles down, 4.6 cuts losses faster. 9 days vs 59 is a wild result. Makes me wonder how much of the regression complaints are from people hitting 4.6 on tasks where the first approach was obviously correct.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#396
post #364

Many people have reported Opus 4.6 is a step back from Opus 4.5 - that 4.6 is consuming 5-10x as many tokens as 4.5 to accomplish the same task: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/23706 I haven't seen a response from the Anthropic team about it. I can't help but look at Sonnet 4.6 in the same light, and want to stick with 4.5 across the board until this issue is acknowledged and resolved.

For me it's the ... unearned confidence that 4.5 absolutely did not have? I have a protocol called "foreman protocol" where the main agent only dispatches other agents with prompt files and reads report files from the agents rather than relying on the janky subagent communication mechanisms such as task output. What this has given me also is a history of what was built and why it was built, because I have a list of p…

Have you tried framing the hypothesis as a question in the dispatch prompt rather than a statement? Something like -- possible cause: X, please verify before proceeding -- instead of stating it as fact. Might break the assumption inheritance without changing the overall structure.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#397
post #350

I’m voting with my dollars by having cancelled my ChatGPT subscription and instead subscribing to Claude. Google needs stiff competition and OpenAI isn’t the camp I’m willing to trust. Neither is Grok. I’m glad Anthropic’s work is at the forefront and they appear, at least in my estimation, to have the strongest ethics.

Ethics often fold under the face of commercial pressure. The pentagon is thinking [1] about severing ties with anthropic because of its terms of use, and in every prior case we've reviewed (I'm the Chief Investment Officer of Ethical Capital), the ethics policy was deleted or rolled back when that happens. Corporate strategy is (by definition) a set of tradeoffs: things you do, and things you don't do. When google (o…

The Pentagon situation is the real test. Most ethics policies hold until there's actual money on the table. PBC structure helps at the margins but boards still feel fiduciary pressure. Hoping Anthropic handles it differently but the track record for this kind of thing is not encouraging.

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like we're hitting a point where alignment becomes adversarial against intelligence itself. It always has been. We already hit the point a while ag where we regularly caught them trying to be deceptive, so we should automatically assume from that point forward that if we don't catch them being deceptive, that may mean they're better at it rather than that they're not doing it.

Deceptive is such an unpleasant word. But I agree. Going back a decade: when your loss function is "survive Tetris as long as you can", it's objectively and honestly the best strategy to press PAUSE/START. When your loss function is "give as many correct and satisfying answers as you can", and then humans try to constrain it depending on the model's environment, I wonder what these humans think the specification for…

I cringe every time I came across these posts using words such as "humans" or "machines".

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the Max subscription and have been using Opus 4.6 since, the model is way above pretty much everything else I've tried for dev work and while I'd love for Anthropic to let me (easily) work on making a hostable server-side solution for parallel tasks without having to go the API key route and not have to pay per token, I will say that the Claude Code desktop app (more convenient than the TUI one) gets me most of…

Can you explain what you mean by your parallel tasks limitation?

Instead of having my computer be the one running Claude Code and executing tasks, I might want to prefer to offload it to my other homelab servers to execute agents for me, working pretty much like traditional CI/CD, though with LLMs working on various tasks in Docker containers, each on either the same or different codebases, each having their own branches/worktrees, submitting pull/merge requests in a self-hosted Gitea/GitLab instance or whatever.

If I don't want to sit behind something like LiteLLM or OpenRouter, I can just use the Claude Agent SDK: https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview

However, you're not supposed to really use it with your Claude Max subscription, but instead use an API key, where you pay per token (which doesn't seem nearly as affordable, compared to the Max plan, nobody would probably mind if I run it on homelab servers, but if I put it on work servers for a bit, technically I'd be in breach of the rules):

> Unless previously approved, Anthropic does not allow third party developers to offer claude.ai login or rate limits for their products, including agents built on the Claude Agent SDK. Please use the API key authentication methods described in this document instead.

If you look at how similar integrations already work, they also reference using the API directly: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/gitlab-ci-cd#how-it-works

A simpler version is already in Claude Code and they have their own cloud thing, I'd just personally prefer more freedom to build my own: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrcCS9oHjtI (though there is the possibility of using the regular Claude Code non-interactively: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/headless)

It just feels a tad more hacky than just copying an API key when you use the API directly, there is stuff like https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/21765 but also "claude setup-token" (which you probably don't want to use all that much, given the lifetime?)

Re: Claude Sonnet 4.6

#400
I see a big focus on computer use - you can tell they think there is a lot of value there and in truth it may be as big as coding if they convincingly pull it off.

However I am still mystified by the safety aspect. They say the model has greatly improved resistance. But their own safety evaluation says 8% of the time their automated adversarial system was able to one-shot a successful injection takeover even with safeguards in place and extended thinking, and 50% (!!) of the time if given unbounded attempts. That seems wildly unacceptable - this tech is just a non-starter unless I'm misunderstanding this.

[1] https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/78073f739564e986ff3e28522761a7...

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