The Known Good Updated 25 Jul 2026
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 ·Anthropic vs DeepSeek

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 profile DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 profile All comparisons
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic
Quality
#17 of 61
80based on 4 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#197 of 316
41.2
Output tokens per second
Price
#301 of 340
$6.00
Blended per 1M tokens
In $3.00 · Out $15.00
Cache hit price
#165 of 206
$0.30
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#55 of 345
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 — DeepSeek
Quality
#44 of 61
44based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#280 of 316
20.9
Output tokens per second
Price
#105 of 340
$0.35
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.20 · Out $0.80
Cache hit price
#10 of 206
$0.003
per 1M tokens (−99%)
Context
#225 of 345
164k
tokens (~300 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 80 and DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 scores 44 — a 35-point lead for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6. They share 2 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 ahead on 2 and DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 ahead on 0.

Blended pricing is $6.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $0.35 for DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 — DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 is about 17.1× cheaper.

Throughput is 41 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 21 for DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3, with time to first token at 1.6s and 1.1s. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts 1.00M tokens of context against 164k.

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 is proprietary; DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 is open weights under Open weights (restricted use). 7 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 25 Jul 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3
Known Good Index 80 based on 4 of 6 evaluations 44 based on 3 of 6 evaluations
Blended $/1M $6.00 $0.35
Output tok/s 41 21
Context window 1.00M 164k
Providers 4 3
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

IndicesComponents
Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3
Known Good Index 80 44
Coding Index 71 —
Mathematics Index 86 40
Science Index 91 53
Reasoning Index — 52
Agentic Index 71 —
Openness Index 5 60
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 · marker = DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond87 / 57
MATH / AIME86 / 16

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 / DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 2 of 2, DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 on 0.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3
Text Arena 1,458 1,333
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,473 1,358
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Per token typeCache discount
Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3
Input $/1M $3.00 $0.20
Output $/1M $15.00 $0.80
Blended $/1M $6.00 $0.35
Cache read $/1M $0.300 $0.003
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3
Context window 1.00M 164k
Max output tokens 128k 16k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Median throughput and time to first token across hosting providers

Output speedTime to first token
Throughput and latency

Medians across all tracked providers, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3
Output tokens/s 41 21
Time to first token 1.6s 1.1s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

7 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 blendedAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 tok/s DeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 blendedDeepSeek: DeepSeek V3 tok/s
Amazon Bedrock · first party $6.00 41 — —
Google · first party $6.00 41 — —
Anthropic · first party $6.00 38 — —
Azure · first party $6.00 — — —
StreamLake — — $0.35 24
DeepInfra — — $0.46 20
Novita — — $0.62 14

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →