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How much energy does Claude 3.5 Sonnet use?

Anthropic · released 2024-06-20

Claude 3.5 Sonnet uses about 0.029 Wh – 0.554 Wh of electricity to answer a typical question. That places it 169 of 266 among the models we can measure, and every figure here is calculated the same way as every other model.

A typical question
0.029 Wh – 0.554 Wh
A long, complex answer
0.670 Wh – 12.9 Wh
Capability
130.0
Energy rank
169 of 266
Human votes
1298

How capable is it, really?

The capability figure of 130.0 is a composite over 58 benchmarks — Epoch AI's Capabilities Index, which folds in software engineering, agentic tool use, long-context comprehension and creative writing as well as science reasoning. It is one number standing for a lot of separate tests, so treat a small gap between two models as noise rather than a ranking.

87,694 people have voted on it in blind head-to-head comparisons on LMArena, giving it a rating of 1298. This is the only figure here that measures whether anyone actually prefers the answers, rather than how the model scores on a test. Broken down, people rate it 1343 on coding, 1292 on creative writing, 1297 on following instructions.

What this figure is

Inferred  The maker publishes no size at all, so it is inferred from how capable the model is and when it was released. A wide bracket, not a figure. Every model on this site is calculated the same way, so the comparison holds even where the absolute value carries uncertainty. Our figures are good to roughly a factor of two to three, which is why we only ever state a difference of 5× or more.

We cannot pin this one down. Anthropic has never published how Claude 3.5 Sonnet is built, and the two plausible answers are far apart — which is why a range is shown rather than a figure. It is listed because leaving it out would reward the silence, and it is barred from every headline claim on this site.

Is there a better choice?

A lighter model that does the job
Alibaba · capability 146.5. It scores higher than Claude 3.5 Sonnet on Epoch's Capabilities Index (146.49 against 130.0), the composite over 58 benchmarks that the capability figure above comes from, and uses about 8.4× less energy per answer: 0.351 Wh against 2.94 Wh. It has not faced human head-to-head voting, where Claude 3.5 Sonnet carries 87,694 votes — worth weighing. See them side by side →

What Anthropic publishes

Energy cannot be worked out without knowing how big a model is. Of the 23 models from Anthropic that we track, 10 can be assessed at all — the rest publish too little for anyone outside the company to calculate anything.

Where these figures come from

Capability and the roster come from Epoch AI, whose Capabilities Index is the 58-benchmark composite quoted above. Energy is calculated with EcoLogits and calibrated against laboratory measurements from ML.ENERGY. Human preference comes from LMArena. All four are public and free; the full method is here.

These figures are published under CC BY 4.0 — use them anywhere, including commercially, with credit to The AI Footprint.

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Figure calculated 2026-09-20 · how these numbers are made · the full comparison of 266 models