Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GLM-4.6

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-4.6, released by Zhipu AI in September 2025, is a large language model with approximately 357 billion parameters from the GLM-4 family, featuring an expanded 200K token context window. It supports strong mathematical reasoning, coding, and agentic orchestration tasks. GLM-4.6 targets enterprise-ready open-source deployments under an MIT license, with availability through Zhipu AI's Z.ai platform.