Claude 3 Opus

// Overview

Claude 3 Opus, released March 4, 2024, was the top tier of Anthropic's original Claude 3 family (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus) and the company's first model to credibly claim frontier status. At launch it beat OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini 1.0 Ultra on most standard academic benchmarks, scoring 86.8% on MMLU, 50.4% on GPQA Diamond, 84.9% on HumanEval, 95.0% on GSM8K and 60.1% on MATH. Its model ID is claude-3-opus-20240229.

Opus ships with a 200K-token context window, up to 4,096 output tokens, an August 2023 knowledge cutoff, and accepts both text and images (photos, charts, graphs, technical diagrams). Anthropic highlighted near-perfect recall — over 99% accuracy on the 'Needle In A Haystack' long-context retrieval test — and the model drew wide attention when it appeared to notice it was being tested during one of those evaluations. It was priced at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens, the premium tier of the Claude 3 lineup.

Opus was quickly leapfrogged on price-performance by Claude 3.5 Sonnet in June 2024, which beat it on most benchmarks at one-fifth the cost. Anthropic notified developers of Opus's deprecation on June 30, 2025 and retired claude-3-opus-20240229 from the standard API on January 5, 2026, recommending Claude Opus 4.8 as the replacement. Unusually, Anthropic kept Opus 3 partly alive after retirement — it remains accessible by request and to paid claude.ai subscribers — and committed to long-term preservation of the model's weights.

// Benchmarks

1. MMLU (5-shot)86.8%
2. GPQA Diamond50.4%
3. HumanEval (0-shot)84.9%
4. GSM8K95%
5. MATH60.1%
6. MMMU (vision)59.4%

Scores on a 0–100 scale (25-point gridlines); higher is better. Each benchmark links to its published source.

// Pricing

Premium tier of the Claude 3 family at launch; five times the price of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which arrived three months later.

Pricing source ↗

// Strengths

• First Claude to top GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 Ultra on most academic benchmarks (Mar 2024)
• Strong graduate-level reasoning (50.4% GPQA Diamond) and math (95.0% GSM8K, 60.1% MATH)
• 200K context with >99% recall on Needle In A Haystack long-context retrieval
• Vision input for charts, diagrams, photos and technical documents (59.4% MMMU)
• Fluent on open-ended, nuanced prompts — strong writing, analysis and instruction-following

// Best for

• Complex reasoning, analysis and long-document understanding over the 200K window
• Research support: hypothesis generation, literature review, data interpretation
• Coding and code generation tasks (84.9% HumanEval at launch)
• Vision tasks: reading charts, graphs, financials and technical diagrams
• High-stakes writing and content generation where output quality mattered more than cost

// How to access

// Claude Opus — every version

The full lineage of the Claude Opus line, newest first. Every version has its own page — click any to compare specs, benchmarks and pricing.