Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GLM-4.5 Air

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.

Zhipu AI

GLM-4.5 Air is a lightweight variant from Zhipu AI's GLM-4 model family, designed for efficient deployments requiring lower inference cost while maintaining strong language understanding and generation capabilities. It targets cost-sensitive production workloads, API integrations, and applications where the full GLM-4.x series capacity exceeds requirements.