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.
When not to use this
- Not ideal for simple tasks where cheaper models in the same lineup are good enough.
- Avoid for regulated or high-stakes outputs without evaluations that mimic your tooling, data, and review process.
- Pair catalog notes with comparisons and your own benchmarks before declaring a routing winner.
Technical specs
- Inputs
- text, image
- Outputs
- text
- Capabilities
- general chat, analysis
- License
- See vendor
- Model string
claude-3-sonnet
Benchmarks
No benchmark data yet.
Anthropic Claude family lineup
Current models
Compare with
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