Model comparison
Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs Mistral Medium 3.5
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 50.3 to 40.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 2.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Last verified . 21 shared benchmarks.
Mistral AISummary
- They share 21 benchmarks with published results for both. Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher in 8 categories and Mistral Medium 3.5 in 1 category; 8 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads 46.1 to 17.3.
- The biggest single-benchmark swing is NYT Connections (extended): 80.9% for Claude Sonnet 4.6 and 12.9% for Mistral Medium 3.5.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper at $1.50 / $7.50 per million input/output tokens, against $3 / $15 for Claude Sonnet 4.6.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 accepts more context: 1M tokens versus 262K.
- Mistral Medium 3.5 has downloadable open weights; the other is API-only.
Side by side
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 50.3 | 40.2 |
| Released | 2026-02-17 | — |
| Weights | Proprietary | Open |
| Context window | 1M | 262K |
| Max output | 128K | 210K |
| Input $ / M tokens | $3 | $1.50 |
| Output $ / M tokens | $15 | $7.50 |
| Results tracked | 57 | 22 |
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Category by category
Coding Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.3 (#67), Mistral Medium 3.5: 36.0 (#213)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena WebDev | 1522 | 1264 |
| LMArena Coding | 1504 | 1461 |
| SWE-bench Verified | 75.2% | — |
| DeepSWE | 29.9% | — |
| FrontierCode | 24.3% | — |
| SciCode | 46.8% | — |
| WeirdML | 66.1% | — |
| ALE-Bench | 1,327 | — |
Agentic & Tool Use Not comparable
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 39.1 (#28), Mistral Medium 3.5: —
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Terminal-Bench | 53.4% | — |
| APEX-Agents | 43% | — |
| OSWorld 2.0 | 9.3% | — |
| DeepResearch Bench | 54.9% | — |
| OSWorld | 72.1% | — |
| ExploitBench | 23.6% | — |
| GBAEval | 48.8% | — |
| GDP.pdf | 18% | — |
| LMArena Search | 1221 | — |
| Vending-Bench 2 | 7,204 | — |
Reasoning Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 46.1 (#45), Mistral Medium 3.5: 17.3 (#295)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| NYT Connections (extended) | 80.9% | 12.9% |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1484 | 1436 |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 152.24 | 141.35 |
| ARC-AGI-2 | 60.4% | — |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | — | 41.4% |
| ARC-AGI-1 | 86.5% | — |
| CritPt | 3.1% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 13% | — |
| Thematic Generalization | 76.3% | — |
| Mystery Game Puzzles | 16% | — |
| DTBench | 89.9% | — |
| LMCA | 46.5% | — |
| ForecastBench | 62 | — |
Math Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 52.9 (#49), Mistral Medium 3.5: 39.1 (#113)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Math | 1462 | 1431 |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 85.8% | — |
| ProofBench | 45% | — |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | 32.4% | — |
| FrontierMath Tier 4 (v1) | 8.3% | — |
Knowledge Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 51.7 (#65), Mistral Medium 3.5: 40.0 (#126)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1500 | 1432 |
| GPQA Diamond | 87.4% | — |
| SimpleQA Verified | 35.5% | — |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | 10.6% | — |
Multimodal Too close to call
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 38.0 (#68), Mistral Medium 3.5: 38.3 (#65)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Vision | 1283 | 1223 |
| Blueprint-Bench 2 | 6.7% | — |
| LMArena Document | 1482 | — |
Multilingual Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 54.4 (#41), Mistral Medium 3.5: 51.9 (#100)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1440 | 1404 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1491 | 1442 |
| LMArena French | 1465 | 1448 |
| LMArena German | 1428 | 1451 |
| LMArena Korean | 1411 | 1385 |
| LMArena Russian | 1440 | 1395 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1464 | 1409 |
| LMArena Japanese | 1420 | — |
Instruction Following Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 77.4 (#25), Mistral Medium 3.5: 74.6 (#90)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1475 | 1415 |
Long Context Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 45.3 (#44), Mistral Medium 3.5: 43.2 (#103)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1479 | 1415 |
Writing & Preference Claude Sonnet 4.6 leads
Claude Sonnet 4.6: 70.2 (#22), Mistral Medium 3.5: 58.5 (#117)
| Benchmark | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Mistral Medium 3.5 |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1458 | 1421 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1435 | 1374 |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1207 | 993 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1464 | 1423 |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 1810 | — |
Frequently asked questions
Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 better than Mistral Medium 3.5?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the stronger model overall, scoring 50.3 to 40.2 on the Noometry Index. Mistral Medium 3.5 costs 2.0× less per token, which makes it the better buy when Claude Sonnet 4.6's lead doesn't matter for your workload.
Which is cheaper, Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Mistral Medium 3.5?
Mistral Medium 3.5 is cheaper. It lists at $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.6 lists at $3 and $15.
Is Claude Sonnet 4.6 or Mistral Medium 3.5 better for coding?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 scores higher on coding benchmarks: 46.3 versus 36.0 in the Noometry coding category.
Which has the bigger context window?
Claude Sonnet 4.6 does, with 1M tokens against 262K.
How many benchmarks do Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Mistral Medium 3.5 share?
21 benchmarks have published results for both models. Claude Sonnet 4.6 has 57 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Medium 3.5 has 22.