Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max)

Pick DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude Sonnet 4.6 only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority or you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) has the cleaner provisional overall profile here, landing at 87 versus 84. It is a real lead, but still close enough that category-level strengths matter more than the headline number.

DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max)'s sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 75.9 against 66.4. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is HLE, 49% to 37.7%. Claude Sonnet 4.6 does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $1.74 input / $3.48 output per 1M tokens for DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max). That is roughly 4.3x on output cost alone. DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude Sonnet 4.6 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. DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.6.