Claude Sonnet 5 is the next generation of Anthropic's Sonnet model family. It is a drop-in upgrade for Claude Sonnet 4.6 with three behavior changes: adaptive thinking is on by default, manual extended thinking now returns a 400 error (it was deprecated on Claude Sonnet 4.6), and setting sampling parameters (temperature, top_p, top_k) to non-default values returns a 400 error
Claude Sonnet 5 vs Gemini 3.6 Flash
Compare Claude Sonnet 5 from Anthropic and Gemini 3.6 Flash from Google on key metrics including benchmarks, price, context length, and other model features. Access both models and hundreds of others through the AIHubMix API.
Gemini 3.6 Flash provides sustained frontier-level intelligence optimized for real-world tasks at a higher speed and lower cost. Designed for the agentic era, it excels at code generation, agentic execution, and spatial reasoning. This model is particularly effective for rapid agentic loops involving complex coding cycles and iterations.
Pricing & Specifications
Prices are per million tokens. Time to First Token and throughput are rolling averages measured on AIHubMix.
Promotional prices show the discounted rate; see each model page for promotion windows.
Activity Past 30 Days
Daily traffic served through AIHubMix — how demand for each model is trending.
Tokens / day
Requests / day
Performance Past 3 Days
Measured on real AIHubMix traffic, hourly buckets. Gaps mean no traffic in that hour.
Throughput (tok/s)
TTFT (s)
Uptime (%)
LMArena Benchmarks
LMArena ratings by capability (Bradley-Terry, commonly called Elo). Higher is better.
Source: LMArena (arena.ai) leaderboard, imported by AIHubMix. Models without published ratings are omitted per chart.
Cost calculator
Estimate your monthly bill for the same workload on each model.
Monthly = daily × 30. Discounted rates applied where a promotion is active.
FAQ
Which is cheaper: Claude Sonnet 5, Gemini 3.6 Flash?
Gemini 3.6 Flash: $7.5/M output tokens; Claude Sonnet 5: $10/M. Use the cost calculator above to estimate your own workload.
How do their coding arena scores compare?
Claude Sonnet 5: 1521; Gemini 3.6 Flash: 1518 (LMArena coding leaderboard).
Which responds faster?
Claude Sonnet 5: 1.0s time to first token measured on AIHubMix; see the live performance charts above for how each model behaves across the day.
How large is each context window?
Claude Sonnet 5 accepts 1,000,000 and Gemini 3.6 Flash accepts 1,048,576 input tokens. Maximum output per request is 128,000 tokens on Claude Sonnet 5 and 65,536 tokens on Gemini 3.6 Flash.
Which one generates tokens faster?
Claude Sonnet 5 at 7839.1 tok/s and Gemini 3.6 Flash at 98.9 tok/s, measured as output throughput on AIHubMix — a separate metric from time to first token.
What inputs and capabilities does each model support?
Claude Sonnet 5 accepts text, image and PDF input and supports thinking, tool calling, function calling and structured outputs; Gemini 3.6 Flash accepts text, image, video, audio and PDF input and supports thinking, tool calling, function calling, structured outputs, web search and long context.
Can I call Claude Sonnet 5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash with the same API key?
Yes. AIHubMix serves every model on this page behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so switching between them is a one-line change to the model field — no second account, key or SDK.
Popular comparisons
Related model match-ups readers also look at.