Side-by-side technical and economic comparison between Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 and DeepSeek's DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias).
• DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias): Classified as a Legacy Reference model (Legacy Reference (API Aliased)).
| Metric | Claude Sonnet 5 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) | Advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Provider Organization | Anthropic | DeepSeek | — |
| Standard Input / 1M | $2.00 | $0.14 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) (93% lower) |
| Cached Input / 1M | $0.20 | $0.014 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Output / 1M | $10.00 | $0.28 | DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) lower |
| Context Window | 1M | 128k | Claude Sonnet 5 (1M) |
| Max Generation Tokens | 16.4k | 8.2k | Claude Sonnet 5 |
| Tokenizer Family | Anthropic Claude BPE (~65k vocabulary) | DeepSeek Byte-level BPE (~128k vocabulary) | — |
Opt for Claude Sonnet 5 when your engineering requirements prioritize Anthropic's ecosystem, specific tokenizer efficiencies (Calibrated Claude Tokenizer (±3%)), or when your expected prompt-to-completion ratios favor its $2/M input rate.
Opt for DeepSeek-V3 (Legacy API Alias) when looking for DeepSeek's tooling integration, specific context window depth (128k tokens), or when output generation volume favors its $0.28/M rate.