Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o3

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.

o3

OpenAI

OpenAI o3, released by OpenAI in April 2025, is a large reasoning model that applies extended chain-of-thought processing to deliver improved performance on complex math, science, and coding tasks. It features a 200K token context window and native image understanding, with demonstrated strong results on mathematics and software engineering benchmarks. o3 targets demanding analytical and engineering tasks where deliberate, multi-step reasoning produces significantly better outcomes than direct generation.