Anthropic's most capable 2024 flagship — top-tier reasoning, coding, and long-context understanding.
Claude 3 Opus was Anthropic's most powerful model when it launched in March 2024, and it remains a benchmark-setter for nuanced reasoning, careful coding, and 200K-token context. It led many eval leaderboards on first release and is the model teams reach for when the task is hard and the stakes are high. Opus is slower and pricier than Sonnet or Haiku, but when quality matters it still earns its keep.
Who it's for: Researchers, analysts, and engineers who need the strongest reasoning and the longest context window for complex documents and codebases.
Led early 2024 benchmarks on math, coding, and graduate-level questions.
Ingest entire books, codebases, or contract sets in one prompt.
Writes clean, well-structured code across many languages.
Strong safety and refusal behavior tuned for reliability.
Claude 3 Opus is the model to pick when correctness beats speed. For day-to-day work, Claude Sonnet is the better value — but Opus still wins the hardest problems.