Claude 3 Sonnet
Claude 3 Sonnet balanced cost and capability in the Claude 3 generation—useful for general assistants and document workflows where Opus was unnecessary.
Newer version: Claude 3.5 Sonnet
Provider
Anthropic
Model family
Anthropic Claude
LLM
Cost tier
Sonnet
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
- Weaker than 3.5 Sonnet on many coding tasks—test before routing traffic.
- Lifecycle status depends on Anthropic announcements.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text, image
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- general chat, 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 Sonnet FAQ
What is Claude 3 Sonnet?
Claude 3 Sonnet balanced cost and capability in the Claude 3 generation—useful for general assistants and document workflows where Opus was unnecessary. New deployments should compare against Claude 3.5 Sonnet for pricing and quality.
When does Claude 3 Sonnet fit best?
Stable internal bots with predictable cost
What should teams watch out for with Claude 3 Sonnet?
Weaker than 3.5 Sonnet on many coding tasks—test before routing traffic.
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