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
- Cost per token higher than Sonnet for many workloads.
When not to use this
- May be retired or renamed—avoid hard-coding without version pins.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text, image
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- reasoning, writing, analysis
- License
- See vendor
Benchmarks
No independent or vendor benchmark scores in this catalog entry.
Anthropic Claude family lineup
Current models
Previous versions
Related models
Claude 3 Opus FAQ
What is 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. Teams still reference it for historical benchmarks and legacy deployments—verify current availability in API and Bedrock model lists.
When does Claude 3 Opus fit best?
Long-form drafting with tight tone control
What should teams watch out for with Claude 3 Opus?
May be retired or renamed—avoid hard-coding without version pins.
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