Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale

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-Speciale

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale is a high-compute variant of DeepSeek-V3.2 with 685 billion total parameters, made available for a limited period in December 2025. It was released without tool-calling support but demonstrated exceptional reasoning performance, achieving gold-medal results in the 2025 IMO and IOI competitions. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale targets research and benchmarking use cases requiring maximum reasoning capability under an MIT license.