Side-by-side benchmark comparison across agentic, coding, multimodal, knowledge, reasoning, and math workflows.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is clearly ahead on the aggregate, 78 to 56. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Claude Sonnet 4.6's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 60 against 27.6. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 69 to 24.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is also the more expensive model on tokens at $3.00 input / $15.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $0.08 input / $0.30 output per 1M tokens for Seed 1.6 Flash. That is roughly 50.0x on output cost alone. Seed 1.6 Flash 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. Seed 1.6 Flash gives you the larger context window at 256K, compared with 200K for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
Pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Seed 1.6 Flash only becomes the better choice if you want the cheaper token bill or you need the larger 256K context window.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
71.1
Seed 1.6 Flash
54.5
Claude Sonnet 4.6
60
Seed 1.6 Flash
27.6
Claude Sonnet 4.6
91.9
Seed 1.6 Flash
73.1
Claude Sonnet 4.6
87.6
Seed 1.6 Flash
66.8
Claude Sonnet 4.6
71.8
Seed 1.6 Flash
47.3
Claude Sonnet 4.6
91
Seed 1.6 Flash
81
Claude Sonnet 4.6
89.7
Seed 1.6 Flash
72.8
Claude Sonnet 4.6
94.1
Seed 1.6 Flash
67.1
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is ahead overall, 78 to 56. The biggest single separator in this matchup is SWE-bench Verified, where the scores are 69 and 24.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 71.8 versus 47.3. Inside this category, MMLU is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 60 versus 27.6. Inside this category, SWE-bench Verified is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for math in this comparison, averaging 94.1 versus 67.1. Inside this category, AIME 2023 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for reasoning in this comparison, averaging 87.6 versus 66.8. Inside this category, SimpleQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for agentic tasks in this comparison, averaging 71.1 versus 54.5. Inside this category, Terminal-Bench 2.0 is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 91.9 versus 73.1. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 91 versus 81. Inside this category, IFEval is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 has the edge for multilingual tasks in this comparison, averaging 89.7 versus 72.8. Inside this category, MMLU-ProX is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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