Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5

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-5

OpenAI

GPT-5, released by OpenAI on August 7, 2025, is a large language model that combines direct generation and extended reasoning in a single unified system with a built-in routing mechanism. It features a 400K token context window, 128K maximum output tokens, native multimodal support (text, image, audio, video), and demonstrated strong results across coding, mathematics, visual understanding, and health benchmarks at release. GPT-5 targets complex multi-step tasks including advanced coding, mathematical problem solving, and long-context analysis.