Head-to-head comparison across 1benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
82
Mistral Medium 3.5 128B
78
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mistral Medium 3.5 128B only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Coding
+11.2 difference
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Mistral Medium 3.5 128B
$3 / $15
$1.5 / $7.5
44 t/s
N/A
1.48s
N/A
200K
256K
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mistral Medium 3.5 128B only becomes the better choice if coding is the priority or you want the cheaper token bill.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 82 to 78. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $1.50 input / $7.50 output per 1M tokens for Mistral Medium 3.5 128B. That is roughly 2.0x on output cost alone. Mistral Medium 3.5 128B 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. Mistral Medium 3.5 128B gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 82 to 78. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 79.6% and 77.6%.
Mistral Medium 3.5 128B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 77.6 versus 66.4. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench Hard is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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