# Claude 3
Claude 3 was a family of three large language models, Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus, released by the AI company [Anthropic](https://www.edgepedia.org/anthropic) on March 4, 2024, with a 200,000-token context window and, in Anthropic's launch claims, benchmark performance exceeding OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.0 Ultra.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) • [2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) It was the release that briefly put Anthropic at the top of published capability comparisons. This article covers that release; the Claude model family, Anthropic itself, and the consumer Claude products have their own articles.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Release date | March 4, 2024; three models in ascending capability: Haiku, Sonnet, Opus[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) |
| Context window | 200K tokens at launch; all three models reported capable of accepting inputs over 1 million tokens[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) |
| Vendor benchmark claim | Opus achieved state-of-the-art results on GPQA, MMLU, and MMMU[3](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/de8ba9b01c9ab7cbabf5c33b80b7bbc618857627/Claude_3_Opus_Technical_Report.pdf) |
| Pricing (per million tokens, in/out) | Opus $15/$75; Sonnet $3/$15; Haiku $0.25/$1.25; GPT-4 Turbo (128K) $10/$30[4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/) |
| Knowledge cutoff | August 2023[4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/) |
| Parameter count | Not disclosed[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/) |
| Deprecation | Opus deprecated June 30, 2025; retired from the standard API January 5, 2026[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/) |
## What Claude 3 was
Anthropic announced the family on March 4, 2024 as "three state-of-the-art models in ascending order of capability: Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3 Sonnet, and Claude 3 Opus."[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) Opus was the most capable and most expensive; Sonnet was the balanced mid-tier; Haiku was the fast, compact model.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) • [4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/) Anthropic's technical report stated that Haiku performed as well as or better than the previous [Claude 2](https://www.edgepedia.org/claude-2) on most pure-text tasks, meaning even the smallest tier matched the company's prior flagship.[3](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/de8ba9b01c9ab7cbabf5c33b80b7bbc618857627/Claude_3_Opus_Technical_Report.pdf)
The tiering was deliberate. Cofounders Dario and [Daniela Amodei](https://www.edgepedia.org/daniela-amodei) told Forbes that the family was designed with different business needs in mind, and that Anthropic is "more of an enterprise company than a consumer company."[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) On launch day, Opus and Sonnet were available in the API, Sonnet powered the free tier of claude.ai, Opus served Claude Pro subscribers, and Haiku was promised later.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family)
## Architecture and training as published
Anthropic disclosed relatively little. The launch materials and technical report describe a 200K-token context window, vision (image) input alongside text, and an August 2023 training-data cutoff.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) • [4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/) • [5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/) The technical report indicates that Anthropic trained on internally generated synthetic data in addition to common internet data.[4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/)
What was withheld was as notable as what was shared: no parameter counts were disclosed.[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/)
## Benchmarks: vendor claims versus independent results
Anthropic's technical report claimed "a new standard on measures of reasoning, math, and coding," with Opus achieving state-of-the-art results on GPQA, MMLU, MMMU "and many more."[3](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/de8ba9b01c9ab7cbabf5c33b80b7bbc618857627/Claude_3_Opus_Technical_Report.pdf) Forbes reported the company's claim that Opus outperformed GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 Ultra across a series of intelligence benchmarks.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) One tracker compiles Anthropic's published Opus scores as MMLU 86.8% (5-shot), GPQA Diamond 50.4%, [HumanEval](https://www.edgepedia.org/humaneval) 84.9% (0-shot), GSM8K 95%, MATH 60.1%, and MMMU 59.4%.[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/) These figures come from the vendor's own tables; the evidence record contains no independent evaluation, such as a third-party leaderboard or audit, confirming them.
The comparison baseline was also narrower than the headline suggested. Amodei conceded in March 2024 that Anthropic's benchmarks did not factor in GPT-4 Turbo or [Gemini 1.5 Pro](https://www.edgepedia.org/gemini-1-5-pro), because those peers had not published corresponding evaluations, adding, "I would be surprised if we did not perform competitively."[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) Within Anthropic's own tables, Sonnet performed more on par with GPT-4, ahead on some benchmarks and behind on others.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) The Decoder cautioned that benchmark wins did not establish real-world superiority, noting GPT-4 had been available for about a year by then.[4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/)
## The 200K context window
The family launched with a 200K-token context window, and Anthropic stated that all three models were "capable of accepting inputs exceeding 1 million tokens," which it might offer to select customers.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) On Anthropic's enhanced needle-in-a-haystack evaluation, which inserted 30 random needle/question pairs per prompt, the company reported that Opus surpassed 99% recall accuracy and in some cases identified the inserted needle as artificial, flagging the limits of the test itself.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family)
These are vendor-reported results. The evidence record contains no independent tests of how the models degraded, or not, at full context length, so the 200K claim's real-world reliability rests on Anthropic's own evaluation.
## Pricing, licensing and availability
Claude 3 was available through API access and consumer subscriptions. Launch pricing per million tokens was $15 input and $75 output for Opus, $3 and $15 for Sonnet, and $0.25 and $1.25 for Haiku, against GPT-4 Turbo's $10 and $30 for the 128K version.[4](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/)
Distribution was multi-cloud from the start. Sonnet was available at launch through [Amazon Bedrock](https://www.edgepedia.org/amazon-bedrock) and in private preview on Google Cloud's Vertex AI Model Garden.[1](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family) In March 2024, Google announced that Claude 3 Sonnet and Haiku were generally available to all customers on [Vertex AI](https://www.edgepedia.org/vertex-ai), with Opus to follow in coming weeks.[6](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/anthropics-claude-3-models-go-ga-on-vertex-ai)
## Reception and disclosed weaknesses
The launch was received as the moment a challenger briefly topped GPT-4 on published benchmarks, with Forbes reporting Anthropic's claim directly and Amodei's caveat about missing competitors.[2](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/) Anthropic's own technical white paper identified two weaknesses: hallucinations, which tended to occur when the models misinterpreted visual data such as what an image portrays, and failing to acknowledge when an image is harmful.[7](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-startup-anthropic-claude-3-model-chatgpt-gemini-rcna141705) Both weaknesses involve images.
Adoption evidence in the record is thin and comes from partners: Google's post names GitLab and Quora's Poe among enterprise users on Vertex AI.[6](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/anthropics-claude-3-models-go-ga-on-vertex-ai)
## What changed after launch: 2024–2026 in retrospect
Claude 3 Opus's reign at the top was short. In June 2024, [Claude 3.5 Sonnet](https://www.edgepedia.org/claude-3-5-sonnet) beat Opus on most benchmarks at one-fifth the cost, resetting the price-performance frontier within Anthropic's own lineup.[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/) The Opus line continued with later releases, including Opus 4 (May 22, 2025), Opus 4.5 (November 24, 2025), Opus 4.8 (May 28, 2026), and Opus 5 (July 24, 2026, with 1M context), per the same tracker; these dates are not independently verified in the evidence.[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/)
Anthropic deprecated Opus 3 on June 30, 2025 and retired claude-3-opus-20240229 from the standard API on January 5, 2026, recommending [Claude Opus 4](https://www.edgepedia.org/claude-opus-4).8 as the replacement.[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/) Unusually, the model was not fully switched off: it remains accessible by request and to paid claude.ai subscribers, and Anthropic committed to long-term preservation of the weights.[5](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/)
Several questions were never settled in the public record: no independent evaluation of the launch benchmark claims appears in the evidence; the parameter count was never disclosed; and independent long-context testing is absent. Claude 3's historical significance therefore rests partly on claims Anthropic made at launch, and partly on what followed within its own lineup.
## References
1. [Introducing the next generation of Claude (Anthropic)](https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-3-family)
2. [AI Unicorn Anthropic Releases Claude 3, A Model It Claims Can Beat OpenAI's Best (Forbes)](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2024/03/04/anthropic-releases-claude-3-claims-beat-openai/)
3. [The Claude 3 Model Family: Opus, Sonnet, Haiku (Anthropic technical report)](https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/de8ba9b01c9ab7cbabf5c33b80b7bbc618857627/Claude_3_Opus_Technical_Report.pdf)
4. [Anthropic unveils new 'Claude 3' AI models to beat OpenAI and Google (The Decoder)](https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-unveils-new-claude-3-ai-models-to-beat-openai-and-google/)
5. [Claude 3 Opus: Specs, Benchmarks & Pricing (AI/TLDR)](https://ai-tldr.dev/models/claude-3-opus/)
6. [Anthropic's Claude 3 models go GA on Vertex AI (Google Cloud Blog)](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/anthropics-claude-3-models-go-ga-on-vertex-ai)
7. [AI startup Anthropic unveils new models that challenge Big Tech (NBC News)](https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-startup-anthropic-claude-3-model-chatgpt-gemini-rcna141705)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Technology and the built world › Computing and digital systems › Modern AI: foundation models, generative AI, and the AI industry › Model families and named models › Large language model families › Proprietary model families*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 19, 2026 · Edited: Sep 19, 2026 · Last review: Sep 19, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license