Claude 3 Opus
Claude 3 Opus was Anthropic’s highest-capability Claude 3-era model for difficult reasoning, nuanced writing, and complex analysis before later Sonnet generations.
Newer version: Claude Opus 4.5
Provider
Anthropic
Model family
Anthropic Claude
LLM
Cost tier
Opus
Status
Legacy
Why teams choose it
Complex reasoning
Useful for workflows that require structured thinking, multi-step logic, and deeper analysis than lightweight models provide.
Long-context analysis
Helps teams summarize, compare, and extract insights from long documents without losing important nuance.
Coding and tools
Works well for code assistance, tool calling, and agent workflows where instructions must stay consistent across steps.
Cost-efficient routing
Useful as part of a routing stack where cheap models handle drafts and confirmations and this tier handles genuinely hard passages.
Tradeoffs to know
- May be retired or renamed—avoid hard-coding without version pins.
- Cost per token higher than Sonnet for many workloads.
When not to use this
- Not ideal for simple tasks where cheaper models in the same lineup are good enough.
- Avoid for latency-sensitive real-time chat when raw response speed outweighs reasoning depth.
- Confirm limits, pricing, and regional availability on the provider side before committing production workloads.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text, image
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- reasoning, writing, analysis
- License
- See vendor
- Model string
claude-3-opus
Benchmarks
No benchmark data yet.
Anthropic Claude family lineup
Current models