Seed 1.6 vs Claude 4 Sonnet

Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.

Seed 1.6 finishes one point ahead overall, 65 to 64. That is enough to call, but not enough to treat as a blowout. This matchup comes down to a few meaningful edges rather than one model dominating the board.

Seed 1.6's sharpest advantage is in agentic, where it averages 62.3 against 57.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is Terminal-Bench 2.0, 63 to 56. Claude 4 Sonnet does hit back in coding, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Seed 1.6 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4 Sonnet is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Seed 1.6 gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude 4 Sonnet.

Quick Verdict

Pick Seed 1.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4 Sonnet only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Agentic

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

62.3

Claude 4 Sonnet

57.9

63
Terminal-Bench 2.0
56
67
BrowseComp
62
58
OSWorld-Verified
57

Coding

Claude 4 Sonnet

Seed 1.6

42.4

Claude 4 Sonnet

42.9

64
HumanEval
65
46
SWE-bench Verified
51
38
LiveCodeBench
36
46
SWE-bench Pro
48

Multimodal & Grounded

Claude 4 Sonnet

Seed 1.6

79.6

Claude 4 Sonnet

79.7

80
MMMU-Pro
81
79
OfficeQA Pro
78

Reasoning

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

74.5

Claude 4 Sonnet

71.8

69
SimpleQA
71
69
MuSR
69
86
BBH
82
77
LongBench v2
71
78
MRCRv2
72

Knowledge

Claude 4 Sonnet

Seed 1.6

56.4

Claude 4 Sonnet

56.8

73
MMLU
73
72
GPQA
73
70
SuperGPQA
71
68
OpenBookQA
69
75
MMLU-Pro
75
11
HLE
12
68
FrontierScience
67

Instruction Following

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

87

Claude 4 Sonnet

83

87
IFEval
83

Multilingual

Seed 1.6

Seed 1.6

83.4

Claude 4 Sonnet

82.1

88
MGSM
84
81
MMLU-ProX
81

Mathematics

Claude 4 Sonnet

Seed 1.6

75.9

Claude 4 Sonnet

76.1

72
AIME 2023
73
74
AIME 2024
75
73
AIME 2025
74
68
HMMT Feb 2023
69
70
HMMT Feb 2024
71
69
HMMT Feb 2025
70
71
BRUMO 2025
72
82
MATH-500
81

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Seed 1.6 is ahead overall, 65 to 64. The biggest single separator in this matchup is Terminal-Bench 2.0, where the scores are 63 and 56.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 56.8 versus 56.4. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 42.9 versus 42.4. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 76.1 versus 75.9. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 74.5 versus 71.8. Inside this category, LongBench v2 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for agentic tasks, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 62.3 versus 57.9. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multimodal and grounded tasks, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Claude 4 Sonnet has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 79.7 versus 79.6. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for instruction following, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 87 versus 83. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for multilingual tasks, Seed 1.6 or Claude 4 Sonnet?

Seed 1.6 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 83.4 versus 82.1. Inside this category, MGSM is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 12, 2026

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