Claude 3 Sonnet
Anthropic
DISCONTINUED. Anthropic's balanced model striking ideal equilibrium between intelligence and speed for enterprise workloads. Released March 2024 alongside Opus and Haiku in Claude 3 family. Delivers 2x faster performance than Claude 2/2.1 with higher intelligence levels. Excels at tasks demanding rapid responses like knowledge retrieval or sales automation. Strong performance at lower cost compared to peers, engineered for high endurance in large-scale AI deployments. Features 200K context window and sophisticated vision capabilities processing photos, charts, graphs, technical diagrams. Positioned between Haiku (speed) and Opus (capability). Anthropic retired it on July 21, 2025; requests to retired models fail.
Strengths
- Ideal balance of intelligence and speed for enterprise workloads
- 2x faster than Claude 2/2.1 while delivering higher intelligence
- 200K context window for large document processing
- Sophisticated vision capabilities - photos, charts, graphs, diagrams
- Lower cost than Opus while maintaining strong performance ($3 vs $15 input)
- Engineered for high endurance in large-scale deployments
- Excellent for knowledge retrieval and rapid-response applications
Caveats
- DISCONTINUED - retired by Anthropic on July 21, 2025
- Migrate to Claude Sonnet 4.6 or later
- Lower ceiling than Claude 3 Opus for most complex tasks
- Superseded by Claude 3.5 Sonnet (June 2024) with better performance
- August 2023 knowledge cutoff older than competitors
- 4K max output tokens lower than newer models
- More expensive than Claude 3 Haiku for speed-critical tasks ($3 vs $0.25)
- Vendor
- Anthropic
- Context Window
- 200,000 tokens
- Max Output
- 4,096 tokens
- License
- Proprietary
- Release Date
- 2024-03-04
- Modalities
- textimage
| Benchmark | Score | Max |
|---|---|---|
| livebench_instruction_following | 63.6 | 100.0 |
| livebench_coding | 26.4 | 100.0 |
| livebench_language | 38.1 | 100.0 |
Capabilities
Resources
Pricing
$3.00 per 1M input tokens, $15.00 per 1M output tokens