Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek-V3.2

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.

DeepSeek-V3.2

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2, released by DeepSeek on December 1, 2025, is a large language model with 685 billion total parameters featuring integrated thinking in tool-use and support for both reasoning and direct generation modes. It features a 128K token context window and introduced large-scale agent training across 1,800+ environments. DeepSeek-V3.2 targets agentic workflows, complex instruction following, and coding tasks under an open MIT license.