Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs Mistral Small 3 24B

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Anthropic

Claude Sonnet 4.5, released by Anthropic in September 2025, is a large language model from the Claude 4.5 family that balances response quality and efficiency for coding, agentic tasks, and analytical work. 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 4.5 targets use cases that require a balance of throughput and reasoning depth, including code generation, data analysis, and multi-step agentic pipelines.

Mistral Small 3 24B

Mistral AI

Mistral Small 3 is a 24-billion-parameter open-weight language model from Mistral AI, released in January 2025 as an update to the Mistral Small line with targeted improvements to instruction-following, multilingual reasoning, and structured output quality. Released under Apache 2.0, it was designed for deployment on a single high-VRAM GPU, continuing Mistral's focus on practical efficiency over maximum scale. The model became a widely-used option for teams building internal tooling, customer-facing applications, and local inference pipelines that needed strong general capability without the operational overhead of larger models.