Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Grok 4

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 4

xAI

Grok 4, released by xAI on July 10, 2025, is a large language model featuring first-principles reasoning and comprehensive multimodal support. It features a 260K token context window and demonstrated strong performance on advanced reasoning and coding benchmarks. Grok 4 targets complex multi-step reasoning tasks, scientific analysis, and agentic workflows via the xAI API.