Thinking Machines: Inkling Small vs Anthropic: Claude Sonnet Latest
Side-by-side comparison of specs, pricing, benchmark scores, and task rankings. Updated 2026-11-07.
| Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet Latest | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | thinkingmachines | ~anthropic |
| Quality Score | 100 | 100 |
| Input Price | $0.45/M | $2.00/M |
| Output Price | $1.20/M | $10.00/M |
| Context Window | 524,288 | 1,000,000 |
| Max Output | 262,144 | 128,000 |
| Tool Calling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Structured Output | - | ✓ |
| Reasoning Mode | ✓ | ✓ |
| Vision | ✓ | ✓ |
| Audio | ✓ | - |
The verdict
For a sample job of 1 million input tokens and 250,000 output tokens, Inkling Small costs $0.75 and Claude Sonnet Latest costs $4.50, so Inkling Small is about 6.0 times cheaper for the same work.
Claude Sonnet Latest reads up to 1,000,000 tokens at once, roughly 1,500 pages of text, against about 786 pages for Inkling Small.
Only Inkling Small offers audio input; only Claude Sonnet Latest offers structured output.
Across the 19 tasks where they differ, Inkling Small scores higher on 7 (Code Completion, Code Documentation, Regex Writing and others), Claude Sonnet Latest on 12 (SQL Generation, Code Review, Code Refactoring and others).
Inkling Small was released in July 2026 and Claude Sonnet Latest in April 2026.
Pick Inkling Small if you need lower cost or audio input; pick Claude Sonnet Latest if you need long documents or structured output.
Costs use current list prices per million tokens; page counts assume about 0.75 words per token and 500 words per page.
Who wins by task?
| Task | Thinking Machines: Inkling Small | Anthropic: Claude Sonnet Latest |
|---|---|---|
| SQL Generation | 125 | 132 |
| Code Review | 128 | 132 |
| Code Completion | 131 | 117 |
| Code Refactoring | 132 | 136 |
| Unit Test Generation | 116 | 124 |
| Code Documentation | 131 | 129 |
| Regex Writing | 119 | 117 |
| CI/CD Pipelines | 116 | 120 |
| Frontend Component Design | 118 | 122 |
| Data Analysis | 120 | 124 |
| CSV / Spreadsheet Cleanup | 121 | 132 |
| ETL Scripting | 124 | 128 |
| JSON Extraction | 119 | 121 |
| Bulk Data Labeling | 125 | 118 |
| OCR / Document Parsing | 123 | 131 |
| Table Extraction from PDFs | 123 | 131 |
| Long-Document Summarization | 137 | 136 |
| Short-Form Summarization | 123 | 113 |
| Blog Post Writing | 121 | 120 |
Scores reflect capability match + benchmark data + pricing for each task. Methodology →