Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek-V3.2 Thinking

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 Thinking

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2-Exp (DeepSeek-V3.2 Thinking), released by DeepSeek in September 2025, is the experimental preview release of the DeepSeek-V3.2 model featuring 685 billion total parameters and integrated thinking capabilities. It introduced the architecture and training approaches that became the foundation of the final V3.2 release, including thinking in tool-use and hybrid reasoning modes.