Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Skywork-R1V3-38B

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.

Kunlun Tech

Skywork-R1V3-38B, released by Kunlun Tech's Skywork AI team on July 9, 2025, is a 38 billion parameter multimodal reasoning model built on InternVL-38B with reinforcement learning post-training that enhances both visual and textual reasoning. It uses the GRPO algorithm and cold-start fine-tuning to improve reasoning across image and text modalities. Skywork-R1V3-38B targets open-source multimodal reasoning deployments requiring strong performance across vision-language benchmarks.