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September 29, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect the availability of Claude Sonnet 4.5.
August 5, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect the availability of Claude Opus 4.1.

Key takeaways

Hybrid reasoning Claude models let customers choose between near-instant responses and deeper reasoning.
These models transform how businesses deploy AI for both complex tasks and everyday high-volume operations.
All Claude 4 models are designed to power more capable, autonomous AI agents for multi-step workflows across thousands of steps.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic’s most intelligent model and its best performing model for complex agents and coding.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the availability of Claude Sonnet 4.5 in Amazon Bedrock, which joins the existing Claude 4 models available to customers.

These hybrid reasoning models (meaning they can toggle between near-instant responses and extended thinking) have set new standards across coding, advanced reasoning, and multi-step workflows. They enable sustained performance on complex, long-running tasks and can power AI agents capable of doing hours of work in minutes.

The expansion of Claude models available in Amazon Bedrock enhances customers’ AI choices with increasingly advanced models, simplifying how customers build better, more transformative applications with enterprise-grade security and responsible AI controls.

Why you should care

Performance comparison of AI models across various tasks and benchmarks

The latest Claude models fundamentally change how teams approach complex projects. This is especially true for large enterprises tackling work that requires sustained effort and deep expertise.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic’s most intelligent model and its best performing for both coding and agents, particularly for long-running, complex tasks that require peak accuracy. This includes long-horizon coding tasks that span both sophisticated software projects and everyday development tasks. It demonstrates enhanced knowledge across finance, research, and cybersecurity, supporting use cases like financial forecasting, vulnerability detection and patching, and content generation.
Claude Opus 4.1 delivers improved performance and precision over Opus 4 for coding and agentic tasks. Its advanced coding capabilities include independently planning and executing complex end-to-end development tasks, adapting to the user’s style, while maintaining high quality. The model also offers improved frontend code generation, delivering strong visual output quality with a focus on effectively handling complex logic. Additionally, Opus 4.1’s long-horizon task handling and complex problem-solving abilities make it a compelling virtual collaborator for sustained reasoning and long chains of actions. It also enhances AI agent performance, enabling them to tackle complex, multi-step tasks with accuracy.
Claude Sonnet 4 offers a balance of performance and cost optimization for high-volume use cases. The model can power everything from real-time customer support agents to everyday development tasks like code reviews and bug fixes, and can also serve as a task-specific sub agent to handle multiple tasks at once, such as search, data analysis, or content synthesis. Customers in travel and hospitality can use Claude Sonnet 4 to run customer requests and deliver personalized responses in near real-time.

All models include “extended thinking,” which allows Claude to switch between two modes: deep reasoning and action performance.

Meet the AI

Think of Claude Sonnet 4.5 as a brilliant collaborator that can work independently for hours without missing a beat, expertly juggling multiple complex tasks across coding, financial analysis, and research while consistently delivering polished, actionable results that make everyone's job easier. Claude Opus 4.1 operates like a detail-oriented collaborator for agentic search and research, content creation, and memory and context management, allowing for comprehensive insight synthesis, high-quality content production, and effective summarization. Meanwhile, Claude Sonnet 4 is efficient with a balance of speed and performance, seamlessly switching between tasks—all while maintaining a pragmatic approach and unwavering commitment to getting things done right the first time.

Straight from the source, Anthropic on Claude

"Claude Sonnet 4.5 transforms AI from a tool into a true collaborator for every person and every team. Our customers will see project timelines shrink—in many cases from weeks to hours," said Kate Jensen, head of Growth and Revenue, Anthropic. "Claude models consistently set new standards in coding, advanced reasoning, and multi-step workflows while understanding full business contexts and delivering precise results. The real breakthrough is freeing your talent for strategic work while Claude handles the heavy lifting."

Crunching the numbers

According to Anthropic, Claude Sonnet 4.5 advances its state-of-the-art coding performance to 77.2% on SWE-bench and to 82% when evaluating multiple answers simultaneously (i.e., parallel test-time compute), showing stronger judgment on refactoring and generating production-ready code more effectively.
Beyond coding, Sonnet 4.5 offers new memory capabilities (ability to save, maintain, and reference information over time) and improves Claude’s agentic capabilities with enhanced ability to coordinate with sub-agents. The model also is more consistent, follows directions better, and is more creative in problem solving, making it well suited for enterprise customers.
The models can switch between providing a quick, direct answer and step-by-step thinking—improving performance for multi-step workflows by substantial margins on key industry benchmarks.

The bigger story

This next generation of Claude models represents a significant leap forward in agentic AI capabilities, transforming how businesses can deploy AI for both specialized complex tasks and everyday high-volume operations. Rather than simply generating content, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Sonnet 4 function more like expert virtual collaborators—maintaining focus across complex tasks, preserving relevant context, and delivering complete solutions without constant guidance. This capability transforms how organizations can tackle challenges from developing software systems to creating comprehensive marketing strategies. For everyday users, it means working with AI that better understands their needs and can take on more significant portions of projects independently.

What's around the corner?

According to Anthropic, the latest generation of Claude models points toward a future where AI systems become increasingly capable partners in both creative and knowledge work. For example: taking on more specialized roles in organizations like handling routine analysis, coordinating across departments, and even managing complete workflows with minimal oversight.