Launched on Sep 29, 2025, Claude Sonnet 4.5, the latest AI model from Anthropic, marks a turning point in the evolution of AI. A major upgrade from Claude Opus 4, which could sustain autonomous workflows for just seven hours when it launched in May, the new model can now run autonomously for 30+ hours on complex, multi-step tasks like app development, database setup, and security audits. Claude then is no longer just a chatbot—one can call it an ‘AI teammate’.
This leap in agentic behaviour—where AI models proactively execute tasks across tools and interfaces—could be a turning point for India’s fast-growing SaaS and developer ecosystem. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is designed to use a computer like a human: Navigating browsers, filling spreadsheets, writing and debugging code, and interacting with APIs.
The Amazon-backed startup, currently valued at $183 billion, is making Claude Sonnet 4.5 available to all users. Anthropic describes it as the “best coding model in the world”, citing top performance on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark that measures an AI system’s software engineering capabilities. According to Anthropic, the model is not only better at coding and using computers, but also excels in specialised domains like cybersecurity, finance, and research, making it well-suited for practical business applications.
“People are just noticing with this model, because it’s just smarter and more of a colleague, that it’s kind of fun to work with it when encountering problems and fixing them,” Jared Kaplan, Anthropic’s co-founder and chief science officer, told CNBC in an interview. The model also generates higher-quality code, is better at identifying improvements, and follows instructions more reliably, the company said.
Companies using the new model have been seeing visible improvements. Engineering teams at Netflix are using Claude Sonnet 4.5 to tackle codebase-spanning tasks with “unprecedented accuracy”, according to the company. While at GitHub, Mario Rodriguez, chief product officer, says, “Claude Sonnet 4.5 amplifies GitHub Copilot's core strengths. Our initial evals show significant improvements in multi-step reasoning and code comprehension.”
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Despite the fact that there is already enough competition in the field of frontier models —including OpenAI’s GPT-5, Google DeepMind’s Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Mistral’s Mixtral, Claude is carving out a niche in agentic workflows and developer tooling.
As per reports, recent comparisons have shown that Claude Sonnet 4.5 outperformed GPT-5 Codex on coding speed and cost-efficiency and showed stronger autonomy in long-horizon tasks. Unlike Gemini, which focuses heavily on multimodal capabilities, Claude is optimised for tool use, reasoning, and sustained computer interaction, making it especially attractive for enterprise-grade automation.
A lot of India’s SaaS and devtool startups are uniquely positioned to benefit from this shift. Dev platforms can integrate Claude to offer AI-powered debugging, testing, and deployment. Cybersecurity firms could deploy agents for continuous monitoring and automated audits. SaaS companies might use Claude to automate onboarding, customer support, or backend setup. With Claude’s agentic capabilities and lower compute requirements, Indian startups can build globally competitive AI-native products—without needing Silicon Valley-scale infrastructure.
Claude Sonnet 4.5’s success signals a broader shift in AI strategy: From passive assistants to autonomous agents and from general-purpose models to task-native intelligence.
First Published: Oct 03, 2025, 19:00
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