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Blog/Model Picker/Claude 3

Claude 3

Claude 3 launched March 2024 with Opus, Sonnet, Haiku tiers, vision input, 200K context windows. Specs, benchmark scores, pricing, and the three-tier template.

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Published Feb 8, 2026Model Picker hub

Claude 3 is the launch that pushed Anthropic out of the pure-research corner and into the frontier race. On March 4, 2024, the lineup arrived as three models at three price points, each pitched at a different workload. No AI lab had shipped a coherent family like that before, with clean tradeoffs between speed, cost, and raw capability built right into the release.

Key Specs

SpecOpusSonnetHaiku
API IDclaude-3-opus-20240229claude-3-sonnet-20240229claude-3-haiku-20240307
Context window200K tokens200K tokens200K tokens
Input pricing$15 / 1M tokens$3 / 1M tokens$0.25 / 1M tokens
Output pricing$75 / 1M tokens$15 / 1M tokens$1.25 / 1M tokens
Release dateMarch 4, 2024March 4, 2024March 7, 2024

What Landed With Claude 3

A ladder, not one model. Before this release, you picked one Claude and ate the tradeoffs. Anthropic handed developers a hierarchy instead. Haiku sat at the bottom for cheap, latency-sensitive jobs. Sonnet was the everyday driver. Opus lived at the top for the hardest problems. Every lab copied the shape.

Claude learned to see. Vision was new here. Drop in a photo, a chart, a diagram, a handwritten note, or a screenshot, and the model would read it and talk back. Whole categories of work opened up on day one.

200K token windows across the board. At launch, 200K was close to the biggest context window on the commercial market. Entire codebases, long legal filings, and full research papers fit in one prompt without the chunking ceremony.

Opus swept the benchmarks. The top-tier model took the headline academic evals. MMLU hit 86.8%. GPQA landed at 50.4%. GSM8K came in at 95.0%. Those results cleared GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 Ultra across most tests. No earlier Claude release had a claim on the best-in-class label.

Haiku moved fast. The small model chewed through a 10,000-token research paper, charts and graphs included, in under 3 seconds. Nothing else in the market ran that quick for high-volume, latency-sensitive jobs at that price.

Claude 2 to Claude 3

Claude 2 was one model with one voice. Claude 3 replaced it with a product line. Reasoning, multilingual handling, and accuracy all stepped up in a way you noticed on daily work. The old version refused too much. The new generation engaged with hard requests while keeping its safety lines intact. Vision alone made this a different product.

Current Status

ModelStatus
Claude 3 OpusRetired (January 2026)
Claude 3 SonnetRetired (July 2025)
Claude 3 HaikuStill available

Haiku from this generation is still reachable on the API for lightweight jobs where cost wins over everything else. The 3.5 and 4.x families absorbed what Opus and Sonnet were doing, and those two slots are no longer available.

Related Pages

  • All Claude Models for the full version timeline
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet for the release that beat Opus at a fraction of the cost
  • Model selection guide for picking the right model for your workload

More in Model Picker

  • Claude Mythos: The Model That Thinks in Loops
    Claude Mythos is suspected to use recurrent-depth architecture: one shared layer looped N times, with ACT halting so hard questions get more passes and easy ones stop early.
  • Claude Opus 4.7 vs Other AI Models
    Claude Opus 4.7, GPT-5.4, Kimi K2.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, DeepSeek V3.2: benchmarks, context windows, agent reliability, and cost, so you reach for the right one.
  • DeepSeek V4: Pricing, Context, and Migration
    DeepSeek V4 ships two models: V4-Flash at $0.28/M output and V4-Pro at $3.48/M. Both carry a genuine 1M context window and drop into any Anthropic-compatible SDK with one line changed.
  • Every Claude Model
    Every Claude model on one page: Claude 3, 3.5, 3.7, 4, Opus 4.1 to 4.6, Sonnet 4.5 and 4.6, Haiku 4.5. Specs, pricing, benchmarks, and when to use each.
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 and Claude 3.5 Haiku
    Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 and 3.5 Haiku launched October 2024 with Computer Use beta, cursor control, upgraded coding and tool use, and cheaper Haiku at $0.80/$4.
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet
    Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched June 2024 at $3/$15, beating Claude 3 Opus on MMLU, GPQA, HumanEval at a fifth of the cost. Specs, benchmarks, and code gains.

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On this page

Key Specs
What Landed With Claude 3
Claude 2 to Claude 3
Current Status
Related Pages

Stop configuring. Start building.

SaaS builder templates with AI orchestration.