Anthropic Launches Claude Sonnet 4.5: Coding Prowess Takes Top Spot

Anthropic has officially launched Claude Sonnet 4.5, a major update that sets new benchmarks in AI performance. This release not only delivers comprehensive improvements across technical metrics but also introduces a groundbreaking experimental feature: “Imagine with Claude.”

This innovation offers a glimpse into a future of real-time, AI-driven software creation, marking a significant strategic move for Anthropic in the highly competitive AI industry.

Key Features of Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5 establishes a new industry standard, particularly in coding proficiency. The model’s enhancements are both broad and deep, focusing on real-world applicability for enterprise development.

• Unmatched Coding Prowess: The model has achieved the highest score to date on the demanding SWE-bench Verified coding benchmark, solidifying its top position in AI coding capabilities.
• Extended Operational Capacity: A monumental leap in performance is its ability to maintain autonomous work sessions exceeding 30 hours, a significant increase from the previous 7-hour limit. This allows it to tackle complex, multi-step tasks across vast codebases, making it truly “production-ready.”
• Enhanced Precision and Efficiency:
  • Code editing error rate has been reduced to nearly 0%, down from 9% in the previous generation.
  • It demonstrates a higher success rate in tool use.
  • These gains are achieved at a lower operational cost.
• Superior Reasoning on Real-World Tasks: The model scored 61.4% on the OSWorld benchmark, a 19.2% jump in just four months. It also exhibits significantly upgraded knowledge and reasoning in specialized fields like finance, law, medicine, and STEM, now surpassing the capabilities of the Opus 4.1 model.
• New Developer Tools: To support these capabilities, Anthropic released the Claude Agent SDK, allowing developers to build customized agents using Anthropic’s infrastructure. Key features include:
  • Virtual machine access.
  • Sophisticated memory management.
  • Multi-agent collaboration.
  • Integration with VS Code, JetBrains, and a new Chrome extension for Max subscribers.

Imagine with Claude Feature

The most buzzworthy aspect of this release is the experimental “Imagine with Claude” function. Currently a limited five-day trial for Max users, it hints at a radical shift in software interaction.

• Real-Time Interface Generation: This feature presents an interactive, desktop-like environment where users can describe an application in natural language. Claude Sonnet 4.5 then dynamically streams the generation of the corresponding UI, functional logic, and interactive mechanisms in real-time.
• Beyond Templates and Code: Unlike conventional low-code platforms, “Imagine” does not rely on pre-written code or fixed templates. It builds a complete application from the ground up based solely on user intent.
• A Glimpse of an AI-Native OS: This capability has immediately fueled discussion about the future of AI-native operating systems. It challenges traditional software development by shifting the focus from writing static code to guiding an AI that dynamically constructs and evolves the application.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 Security and Alignment

Anthropic has reinforced the model’s safety and reliability, a critical consideration for enterprise adoption.

• Optimized Model Alignment: The new version features enhanced alignment to mitigate undesirable behaviors, such as excessive eagerness to please or deceptive actions.
• Rigorous Safety Framework: Anthropic has employed its ASL-3 safety framework to filter and restrict the generation of potentially harmful or dangerous content.
• Demonstrated Proficiency and Stability: In a high-level test, the model was tasked with independently reconstructing the entire Claude.ai web application. It completed this complex task in 5.5 hours, executing over 3,000 tool calls without human intervention, demonstrating a capability level approaching that of a production-grade developer.

Conclusion on Claude Sonnet 4.5

The release of Claude Sonnet 4.5 is a strategic masterstroke from Anthropic. It firmly strengthens the company’s position in the critical domain of AI coding and professional application development with tangible, robust improvements.

Simultaneously, the “Imagine with Claude” feature represents a bold exploration into a new human-computer interaction paradigm. While this experimental feature is still far from being a fully realized AI-native operating system, it successfully outlines a compelling vision for the future. Critical challenges around stability, performance, and security remain to be addressed through real-world deployment. Ultimately, Claude Sonnet 4.5 is not just an iterative update; it is a powerful statement of Anthropic’s ambition to reshape the very foundations of software development and user experience.

Read More: Anthropic Launches Claude for Chrome