Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs o4 Mini

Head‑to‑head by test (scores from our 12‑test suite):

• Wins for Claude Sonnet 4.6: creative_problem_solving 5 vs 4 (Sonnet ranks tied 1st among 54 tested), safety_calibration 5 vs 1 (Sonnet tied 1st of 55; o4 Mini rank 32 of 55), agentic_planning 5 vs 4 (Sonnet tied 1st of 54; o4 Mini rank 16). These wins indicate Sonnet is stronger at producing non‑obvious feasible ideas, refusing/allowing correctly per policy, and decomposing goals with failure recovery.
• Win for o4 Mini: structured_output 5 vs 4 (o4 Mini tied 1st of 54), which maps to better JSON schema compliance and format adherence in our tests. Expect fewer formatting errors when strict output shape matters.
• Ties: strategic_analysis (5/5), tool_calling (5/5), faithfulness (5/5), classification (4/4), long_context (5/5), persona_consistency (5/5), multilingual (5/5), constrained_rewriting (3/3). On these core dimensions both models perform similarly in our suite.
• External benchmarks (supplementary): Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores 75.2% on SWE‑bench Verified and 85.8% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI); o4 Mini scores 97.8% on MATH Level 5 and 81.7% on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI). Use these third‑party numbers as task‑specific signals (coding/algorithmic resolution vs competition math) — we attribute them to Epoch AI. In short: Sonnet pulls ahead on safety, creativity, and agentic planning; o4 Mini excels at strict structured output and math benchmarks and is far cheaper.

Raw per‑million token costs: Sonnet 4.6 input $3 / output $15; o4 Mini input $1.10 / output $4.40. Using a simple 50/50 input/output split as an example, cost per million total tokens is $9.00 for Sonnet 4.6 vs $2.75 for o4 Mini. At scale that becomes: 1M tokens/month = $9.00 vs $2.75; 10M = $90 vs $27.50; 100M = $900 vs $275. The ~3.4x price ratio (payload priceRatio 3.409) means teams with heavy throughput or tight margins should favor o4 Mini; teams that need Sonnet’s safety and agentic strengths should budget the higher spend. Savings matter most to high‑volume apps (10M–100M tokens/month) and startups monitoring monthly cloud costs.

Choose Claude Sonnet 4.6 if you need: safety‑calibrated responses, agentic planning, and creative/problem‑solving quality (scores 5 in those tests, tied top ranks), and you can absorb higher costs (output $15/million). Choose o4 Mini if you need: reliable structured output (structured_output 5), top math/competition performance (math_level_5 97.8% per Epoch AI), or a much lower price per token (example: $275/month vs $900/month at 100M tokens with a 50/50 split). If you require both, consider using o4 Mini for high‑volume, schema‑driven inference and Sonnet 4.6 for safety‑critical or heavily agentic workflows.