Claude Sonnet 4.5 vs DeepSeek V3

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

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 59 to 25. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude Sonnet 4.5's sharpest advantage is in reasoning, where it averages 89.9 against 24.9. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SimpleQA, 91% to 24.9%.

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.27 input / $1.10 output per 1M tokens for DeepSeek V3. That is roughly 13.6x on output cost alone. Claude Sonnet 4.5 gives you the larger context window at 200K, compared with 128K for DeepSeek V3.

Quick Verdict

Pick Claude Sonnet 4.5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. DeepSeek V3 only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill.

Agentic

Coming soon

Comparable scores for this category are coming soon. One or both models do not have sourced results here yet.

50%
Terminal-Bench 2.0
Coming soon
61.4%
OSWorld-Verified
Coming soon

Coding

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5

82.1

DeepSeek V3

42

87%
HumanEval
Coming soon
77.2%
SWE-bench Verified
42%

Multimodal & Grounded

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Reasoning

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5

89.9

DeepSeek V3

24.9

91%
SimpleQA
24.9%
89%
MuSR
Coming soon

Knowledge

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5

87.2

DeepSeek V3

69.6

89.1%
MMLU
88.5%
83.4%
GPQA
59.1%
91%
SuperGPQA
Coming soon
89%
OpenBookQA
Coming soon
Coming soon
MMLU-Pro
75.9%

Instruction Following

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Multilingual

Coming soon

Benchmark data for this category is coming soon.

Mathematics

Claude Sonnet 4.5

Claude Sonnet 4.5

96

DeepSeek V3

90.2

97%
AIME 2023
Coming soon
99%
AIME 2024
39.2%
98%
AIME 2025
Coming soon
93%
HMMT Feb 2023
Coming soon
95%
HMMT Feb 2024
Coming soon
94%
HMMT Feb 2025
Coming soon
96%
BRUMO 2025
Coming soon
Coming soon
MATH-500
90.2%

Frequently Asked Questions

Which is better, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or DeepSeek V3?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 is ahead overall, 59 to 25. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SimpleQA, where the scores are 91% and 24.9%.

Which is better for knowledge tasks, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or DeepSeek V3?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 87.2 versus 69.6. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for coding, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or DeepSeek V3?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 82.1 versus 42. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for math, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or DeepSeek V3?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 96 versus 90.2. Inside this category, AIME 2024 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Which is better for reasoning, Claude Sonnet 4.5 or DeepSeek V3?

Claude Sonnet 4.5 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 89.9 versus 24.9. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.

Last updated: March 17, 2026

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