Claude Opus 4.1 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

Claude Opus 4.1

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.1, released by Anthropic in August 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4 family optimized for demanding reasoning, multi-step coding, and extended analysis tasks. It features a 200K token context window, 32K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking capabilities. Opus 4.1 targets complex problem-solving, multi-turn reasoning workflows, and applications requiring deep analysis with integrated tool use.

Claude Sonnet 4.6

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is a general-purpose language model from Anthropic, released in February 2026 as an update to the Sonnet 4 line that introduced adaptive thinking — a mode where the model automatically calibrates its reasoning depth based on task complexity rather than requiring manual configuration by the developer. The model accepts text and image inputs and integrates natively with web search and code execution tools, consolidating capabilities that previously required separate toolchain setup into a unified API surface. It became the primary workhorse model in the Claude 4 series for code assistance, agentic pipelines, and retrieval-augmented applications that benefit from built-in web access.