Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-5.1

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-5.1

OpenAI

GPT-5.1, released by OpenAI in November 2025, is a large language model from the GPT-5 family that delivers incremental improvements in reasoning, instruction following, and multimodal understanding over GPT-5. It features a 400K token context window and targets general-purpose development, long-context analysis, and agentic workflows.