Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Grok 3 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.

Grok 3 mini

xAI

Grok 3 mini, released by xAI alongside Grok 3 in February 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the Grok 3 family featuring RL-enhanced Think mode for extended chain-of-thought processing. It features a 131K token context window and targets STEM tasks, mathematics, and coding applications where cost-efficient reasoning with configurable depth is required.