Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs SAM 3
Compare Claude Sonnet 4.6 and SAM 3 side-by-side. See how these vision models stack up in Object Detection.
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Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs SAM 3 Comparison Table
Evals updated August 6, 2026Pricing updated August 7, 2026
| Property | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | SAM 3 |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | Meta |
| Category | closed | open |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Feb 2026 | Nov 2025 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | — |
| Parameters | ||
| License | Proprietary | Custom |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $3.00 | |
| Output $/1M | $15.00 | |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Object Detection | Demo | Demo |
| Captioning | Demo | |
| Chart Question Answering | ||
| Classification | Demo | |
| Document Question Answering | ||
| Image Tagging | ||
| Instance Segmentation | ||
| Multi-Label Classification | ||
| OCR | Demo | |
| Open Vocabulary Object Detection | ||
| Promptable Concept Segmentation | Demo | |
| Video Object Tracking | ||
| Vision Language | ||
| Visual Question Answering | Demo | |
| Zero Shot Segmentation | ||
| Model Features | ||
| Foundation Vision | ||
| Multimodal Vision | ||
| LLMs with Vision Capabilities | ||
| Zero-shot Detection | ||
Claude Sonnet 4.6 vs SAM 3: Overview
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's mid-tier large language model, released February 17, 2026, designed to balance performance, cost, and versatility for professional and developer use. It supports text and vision-based tasks with advanced reasoning, agentic capabilities, and Adaptive Thinking — a mode where the model dynamically scales its internal reasoning depth. A beta context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens (200K standard) enables processing of entire codebases or document collections in a single request. Parameters are undisclosed.
Optimized for coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, and knowledge work, Sonnet 4.6 delivers a full generational upgrade over Sonnet 4.5 and approaches Opus 4.5-level performance across many benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. It is the default model on Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, and is available via API and major cloud platforms — making it well suited for production workloads requiring strong reasoning without flagship pricing.
Released on November 19th, 2025, Segment Anything 3 (SAM 3) is a zero-shot image segmentation model that “detects, segments, and tracks objects in images and videos based on concept prompts.” This model was developed by Meta as the third model in the Segment Anything series.
Unlike its previous SAM models (Segment Anything and Segment Anything 2), you can provide SAM 3 with the prompt “shipping container” and it will generate precise segmentation masks for all shipping containers in an image. SAM 3 generates segmentation masks that correspond to the location of the objects found with a text prompt.
Frequently Asked Questions
Claude Sonnet 4.6 is released under Proprietary, while SAM 3 uses Custom. Licensing often matters more than raw accuracy for commercial deployments, so check the terms against how you plan to ship.
Yes. The comparison demo on this page runs both models on the same image side by side for object detection in the free Roboflow Playground. You can try it instantly, and a free account unlocks unlimited runs.