Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o3 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.

o3 mini

OpenAI

OpenAI o3 mini, released by OpenAI in January 2025, is a compact reasoning model from the o3 family designed for efficient, cost-effective STEM problem-solving. It features a 200K token context window and adjustable chain-of-thought effort settings, allowing developers to trade reasoning depth for speed. o3 mini targets science, mathematics, and coding applications where lower inference cost and faster response times are a priority.