Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o3 Pro

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 Pro

OpenAI

OpenAI o3-pro, released by OpenAI in June 2025, is an extended reasoning model from the o3 family that applies more compute per response to deliver deeper, more thorough answers on complex problems. It features a 200K token context window, 100K maximum output tokens, and vision capabilities. o3-pro targets research-grade reasoning tasks, extended coding sessions, and applications where accuracy on difficult problems justifies higher inference cost and latency.