Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs GPT-OSS-120B

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-OSS-120B

OpenAI

GPT-OSS-120B, released by OpenAI in August 2025, is an open-weight large language model with 120 billion parameters distributed under the Apache 2.0 license. It represents OpenAI's entry into the open-source model space, enabling developers to self-host and fine-tune a GPT-5-generation-class model. GPT-OSS-120B targets research applications, on-premises deployments, and custom fine-tuning workflows requiring a large open-weight base model.