Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Qwen3-235B-A22B

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.

Alibaba / Qwen

Qwen3-235B-A22B, released by Alibaba's Qwen team on April 28, 2025, is a Mixture-of-Experts large language model with 235 billion total parameters and 22 billion active parameters per inference. It features a 256K token context window, hybrid thinking capabilities (both reasoning and direct generation modes), and was trained on 36 trillion tokens across 119 languages. Qwen3-235B targets complex reasoning, multilingual tasks, and open-source deployments under the Apache 2.0 license.