Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek V3.2: Benchmarks, Pricing & Capabilities Compared
TL;DR — Claude Sonnet 4.6 wins for reasoning · DeepSeek V3.2 wins for cost + long-context.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic
- Released
- 2026-02-17
- Context window
- 500K tokens
- Input price
- $3.00 / Mtok
- Output price
- $15.00 / Mtok
Key features
- Agent Teams: orchestrate 2-16 Claude instances
- Near-Opus performance at 1/5th cost
- 80.8% SWE-bench Verified
DeepSeek V3.2 DeepSeek
- Released
- 2026-02-12
- Context window
- 1M tokens
- Input price
- $0.27 / Mtok
- Output price
- $1.10 / Mtok
Key features
- 1M+ token context window (10x expansion)
- Improved reasoning capabilities
- Open source release
Benchmark comparison
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| HumanEval | 95.2% ✓ | 92.5% |
| MMLU | 92.1% ✓ | 90.1% |
Pricing comparison
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Input ($/Mtok) | $3.00 | $0.27 |
| Output ($/Mtok) | $15.00 | $1.10 |
| Cached input ($/Mtok) | $0.30 | $0.07 |
| Cost per 1M-token roundtrip (1M in + 1M out) | $18.00 | $1.37 |
Context window & modalities
| Attribute | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | DeepSeek V3.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Context window | 500K tokens | 1M tokens |
| Input modalities | text, image, PDF | text |
| Output modalities | text | text |
| Knowledge cutoff | 2025-10 | 2025-09 |
Verdict by use case
Coding
→ Claude Sonnet 4.6
Basis: HumanEval
Claude Sonnet 4.6 95.2% vs DeepSeek V3.2 92.5% on HumanEval.
Reasoning
→ Claude Sonnet 4.6
Basis: GPQA Diamond
Claude Sonnet 4.6 78.4% vs DeepSeek V3.2 68.4% on GPQA Diamond.
Math
Insufficient data
Basis: MATH / AIME
No shared math benchmark.
Long context
→ DeepSeek V3.2
Basis: Context window
Claude Sonnet 4.6 500K tokens vs DeepSeek V3.2 1M tokens.
Cost
→ DeepSeek V3.2
Basis: Input $/Mtok
Claude Sonnet 4.6 $3/Mtok vs DeepSeek V3.2 $0.27/Mtok input.
Changelog & releases
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Released 2026-02-17
Predecessor: anthropic-claude-sonnet-4
- Agent Teams: orchestrate 2–16 Claude instances in parallel
- +8.5pt on SWE-bench Verified vs Sonnet 4
- 1/5 the cost of Opus 4.5 at ~95% of coding quality
- Fast mode research preview for lower-latency inference
DeepSeek V3.2
Released 2026-02-12
Predecessor: deepseek-deepseek-v3
- 10x context window expansion (128K → 1M+ tokens)
- Sliding-window attention for long-context throughput
- Improved chain-of-thought reasoning
- Native FP8 inference support