Claude Sonnet 4 vs DeepSeek-R1

Claude Sonnet 4

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4, released by Anthropic in May 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4 family that delivers a balance of performance and efficiency for coding, reasoning, and analytical tasks. It features a 200K token context window (extendable to 1M tokens in beta), 64K maximum output tokens, native image understanding, and extended thinking support. Sonnet 4 targets development workflows, document analysis, and applications that benefit from the performance characteristics of the Claude 4 generation.

DeepSeek-R1

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-R1, released by DeepSeek on January 20, 2025, is a large reasoning model with 671 billion total parameters (37 billion active in its MoE architecture) designed for extended chain-of-thought reasoning. It features a 128K token context window and demonstrated strong performance on mathematics, coding, and scientific reasoning benchmarks at its release. DeepSeek-R1 targets complex analytical tasks, competitive programming, and applications requiring deep deliberative reasoning under an open MIT license.