Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-4.1 mini

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 mini

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 mini, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a smaller variant from the GPT-4.1 family designed for efficient, cost-effective deployments requiring long-context understanding. It features a 1M token context window and native image understanding, with maintained coding and instruction-following capabilities relative to its size. GPT-4.1 mini targets applications needing a balance between response speed, cost, and capability, such as production APIs with high request volumes.