Claude Opus 4.6 vs Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Claude Opus 4.6

Anthropic

Claude Opus 4.6, released by Anthropic in February 2026, is a large language model from the Claude 4 family designed for complex agent orchestration, extended reasoning, and long-form code generation. It features a 200K token context window (extendable to 1M tokens in beta), 128K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking with both standard and adaptive effort modes. Opus 4.6 targets multi-step agentic workflows, parallel tool use, and applications requiring sustained reasoning over large contexts.

Mistral Small 3.1 24B Instruct

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3.1 is a 24-billion-parameter multimodal model from Mistral AI, released in March 2025 as an update to Mistral Small 3 that added vision understanding and expanded the context window from 32K to 128K tokens. The model accepts both text and image inputs, broadening its applicability to document analysis, image-grounded reasoning, and mixed-media workflows without requiring an increase in parameter count. Released under Apache 2.0, it continued Mistral's pattern of incremental capability gains delivered in compact, practically deployable open-weight packages.