Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Grok 4.1 Fast

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 4.1 Fast

xAI

Grok 4.1 Fast, released by xAI in November 2025, is a fast-response variant from the Grok 4 family featuring a 2M token context window designed for high-throughput applications. It omits thinking tokens for immediate responses, reducing latency while maintaining strong output quality. Grok 4.1 Fast targets production APIs, real-time assistants, and cost-sensitive applications requiring long-context understanding at high volume.