Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-4.1

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.

GPT-4.1

OpenAI

GPT-4.1, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large language model from the GPT-4 family optimized for coding, precise instruction following, and long-context tasks. It features a 1M token context window and native image understanding, with improved performance on tool-calling and web development benchmarks compared to GPT-4o. GPT-4.1 targets software development workflows, long-document analysis, and applications requiring accurate, instruction-adherent outputs.