Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) by Anthropic or DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning) by DeepSeek? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.

Trade-off

AnthropicClaude Sonnet 4.6 (Max)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 30.10
Total cost: $4925

DeepSeekDeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 24.70
Total cost: $194

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) scores 5.4 points higher (30.1 vs 24.7) but costs 25× as much to run the benchmark ($4925 vs $194; flagship vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) when you need intelligence above 24.7, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning) when 24.7 is enough.

Metric	Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max)	DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	30.1	24.7	−17.9% DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (… is 17.9% less intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$4,924.80	$193.84	−96.1% DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (… is 96.1% cheaper
End-to-end time (lower is better)	148.96s	2.91s	−98.0% DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (… is 98.0% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$3.00 / $15.0	$0.30 / $1.20
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning) vs Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max): 17.9% less intelligence, 96.1% less cost to run the AA benchmark, and 98.0% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max): what beats it DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Opus 5.5 (Xhigh, Default Fallback) scores 56.00 for $4057.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Terra (Medium) scores 41.30 for $175.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Max)DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (Non-reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model

Matchup

Compare something else

Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-4-6-adaptive/deepseek-v4-1-flash-non-reasoning · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/claude-sonnet-4-6-adaptive/deepseek-v4-1-flash-non-reasoning?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill