Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o1 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.

o1 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o1 mini, released by OpenAI in September 2024, is a lightweight reasoning model from the o1 family optimized for efficient STEM problem-solving at lower cost and latency. It features a 128K token context window and applies chain-of-thought reasoning specifically tuned for mathematics, science, and coding tasks. o1 mini targets use cases where rapid, cost-efficient reasoning is preferred over the broader capabilities of the full o1 model.