The Known Good Updated 9 Sep 2026 Subscribe
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek: R1 ·Anthropic vs DeepSeek

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs DeepSeek: R1 — head-to-head comparison

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 profile DeepSeek: R1 profile All comparisons
Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic
Quality
#18 of 65
80based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#211 of 341
41.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#398 of 450
$6.00
Blended per 1M tokens
In $3.00 · Out $15.00
Cache hit price
#294 of 344
$0.30
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#120 of 487
1.00M
tokens (~1,500 pages)
DeepSeek: R1 — DeepSeek
Quality
#22 of 65
75based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#310 of 341
19.5
Output tokens per second
Price
#260 of 450
$1.15
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.70 · Out $2.50
Cache hit price
unranked
—
per 1M tokens
Context
#455 of 487
64k
tokens (~98 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 80 and DeepSeek: R1 scores 75 — a 6-point lead for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6. They share 2 published evaluations, with Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 ahead on 2 and DeepSeek: R1 ahead on 0.

Blended pricing is $6.00 per 1M tokens for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and $1.15 for DeepSeek: R1 — DeepSeek: R1 is about 5.2× cheaper.

Throughput is 42 tokens per second for Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 20 for DeepSeek: R1, with time to first token at 1.5s and 1.1s. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts 1.00M tokens of context against 64k.

Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 is proprietary; DeepSeek: R1 is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 6 tracked hosts serve one or both, and 1 serve both.

Generated from tracked data on 9 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: R1
Known Good Index 80 based on 4 of 7 evaluations 75 based on 4 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.15
Output tok/s 42 20
Context window 1.00M 64k
Providers 5 2
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

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: R1
Known Good Index 80 75
Coding Index 73 —
Mathematics Index — 74
Reasoning Index — 77
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: R1 · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond87 / 69
Mock AIME 2024–2586 / 53

Right-hand figures read Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 / DeepSeek: R1. Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads on 2 of 2, DeepSeek: R1 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: R1
Text Arena 1,458 1,372
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,472 1,398
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

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: R1
Input $/1M $3.00 $0.70
Output $/1M $15.00 $2.50
Blended $/1M $6.00 $1.15
Cache read $/1M $0.300 —
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: R1
Context window 1.00M 64k
Max output tokens 128k 16k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6DeepSeek: R1
Output tokens/s 42 20
Time to first token 1.5s 1.1s
The Known Good

Providers

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

6 hosts · 1 serve both
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider Anthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 blendedAnthropic: Claude Sonnet 4.6 tok/s DeepSeek: R1 blendedDeepSeek: R1 tok/s
Amazon Bedrock · first party $6.00 63 — —
Claude Platform on AWS $6.00 39 — —
Google · first party $6.00 39 — —
Azure · first party $6.00 32 $2.60 —
Anthropic · first party $6.00 32 — —
Novita — — $1.15 17

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 →