Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs MiniMax M2.1

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.

MiniMax

MiniMax M2.1, released by MiniMax on December 23, 2025, is a large language model with approximately 230 billion parameters featuring strong multi-language programming capabilities and an industry-leading multilingual coding profile. It features a 196K token context window and is optimized for complex real-world software engineering tasks across Rust, Java, Golang, C++, TypeScript, and other languages. M2.1 targets agentic coding workflows and applications requiring production-grade programming across diverse language environments.