Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Nova 2 Lite

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.

Nova 2 Lite

Amazon

Amazon Nova 2 Lite, released by Amazon Web Services on December 2, 2025, is a fast, cost-efficient reasoning model available on Amazon Bedrock with a 1M token context window enabling extended document, video, and image analysis. It features three extended thinking intensity levels, built-in code interpreter, web grounding tools, and native support for text, image, video, and document input. Nova 2 Lite targets cost-sensitive agentic applications, document analysis pipelines, and real-time workloads requiring multimodal reasoning.