Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-4o

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-4o

OpenAI

GPT-4o, released by OpenAI in May 2024, is a multimodal large language model from the GPT-4 family that natively processes text, image, and audio inputs in a single end-to-end model. It features a 128K token context window and demonstrated competitive performance across coding, reasoning, and vision benchmarks at its release. GPT-4o targets general-purpose assistant applications, vision-enabled workflows, and use cases requiring low-latency multimodal understanding.