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Model

Claude 3 Sonnet

Claude 3 Sonnet was the middle model of Anthropic's Claude 3 family, announced on 4 March 2024. It powered the free tier of claude.ai, offered a 200K-token context window, and was retired on 21 July 2025.

Status DeprecatedModality Text, ImageContext (K tokens) 200 Era Generative AI for everyone

License
Proprietary
Access
API, App, Enterprise
Release date
Developer
Anthropic

What it was

Claude 3 Sonnet was the middle model of the Claude 3 family, which Anthropic announced on 4 March 2024[1]. The family was released in more than one size; Sonnet sat in the middle, between the smaller and larger members, and was positioned as the balance point between capability and cost.

It was priced at $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, and it came with a 200K-token context window[1]. A context window is the amount of text a model can hold in view at one time — a 200K-token window is roughly the length of a long book, which lets a model work over whole documents rather than short snippets.

What it could do

Anthropic said Sonnet was about twice as fast as Claude 2 and Claude 2.1 for most workloads, while also being more intelligent than either of them[1]. Like the rest of the Claude 3 family, it accepted image input, so it could be given pictures as well as text, and it was rated ASL-2 under Anthropic's internal safety-level scheme[1].

Anthropic described three broad uses for the model[1]. The first was data processing — retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where a model is given documents to draw on before answering, plus search and retrieval more generally. The second was sales work, such as product recommendations and forecasting. The third was tasks that save time, such as generating code and pulling text out of images.

Where you could use it

At launch, Claude 3 Sonnet powered the free tier of claude.ai, Anthropic's consumer chat product[1]. Developers could reach it through the Claude API, which was available in 159 countries, and through Amazon Bedrock; on Google Cloud's Vertex AI Model Garden it was offered in private preview[1]. That spread across a first-party app, a direct API and two cloud marketplaces was part of how the model was distributed from day one, rather than being confined to a single channel.

Where it sits in the line

Sonnet's time as the current middle model was short. On 20 June 2024 it was overtaken by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which was offered at the same price[3]. A model that had been the default free-tier experience in March was, three and a half months later, the previous generation.

Anthropic announced the deprecation of the model on 21 January 2025, and the version identifier claude-3-sonnet-20240229 was retired on 21 July 2025[2]. The company's deprecation table pointed users to claude-sonnet-5-5 as the recommended replacement[2].

For readers looking at the Claude line as a whole, Claude 3 Sonnet marks the point where the family settled into a three-size structure with a named middle tier, and where the mid-tier model was treated as good enough to give away free in the chat product while the API and cloud listings handled paying developers[1]. Its retirement date, a little over a year after launch, is also a plain illustration of how quickly model generations turn over: the replacement for a March 2024 model was itself superseded within months, and the API name tied to that model lived on only until the middle of 2025[2][3].

CapabilitiesLarge language modelsMultimodalComputer vision

ApplicationsConsumer appsEnterprise

Version history

20
  1. 2023
    • Mar 14, 2023 Claude (March 2023)

      Claude is the AI assistant Anthropic announced on 14 March 2023, its first publicly available assistant. It was built around training AI to be helpful, honest and harmless, and it started the Claude model line.

    • Jul 11, 2023 Claude 2

      Claude 2 is the second major version of Anthropic's assistant model, released on 11 July 2023 with better performance and longer responses. It was the first Claude model open to the general public.

    • Nov 21, 2023 Claude 2.1

      Claude 2.1, released on 21 November 2023, doubled the context window to 200,000 tokens and cut false statements by half compared with Claude 2.0. It added tool use and system prompts.

  2. 2024
    • Mar 4, 2024 Claude 3 Opus

      Claude 3 Opus, announced on 4 March 2024, was the most capable model in the Claude 3 family. It added vision and launched with a 200K-token context window and a Needle In A Haystack recall above 99%.

    • Mar 4, 2024 Claude 3 Sonnet · This page

      Claude 3 Sonnet was the middle model of Anthropic's Claude 3 family, announced on 4 March 2024. It powered the free tier of claude.ai, offered a 200K-token context window, and was retired on 21 July 2025.

    • Jun 20, 2024 Claude 3.5 Sonnet

      Claude 3.5 Sonnet, released on 20 June 2024, was the first model of the Claude 3.5 family. It ran twice as fast as Claude 3 Opus at the mid-tier price and powered the new Artifacts and Projects features.

    • Oct 22, 2024 Claude 3.5 Sonnet (October 2024 upgrade)

      The upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet, announced on 22 October 2024, raised coding and agentic scores and introduced computer use in public beta, the first such offer from a frontier AI model.

  3. 2025
    • Feb 24, 2025 Claude 3.7 Sonnet

      Claude 3.7 Sonnet, released on 24 February 2025, was described by Anthropic as the first hybrid reasoning model on the market, able to answer quickly or think step by step at length. It launched with Claude Code.

    • May 22, 2025 Claude 4 (Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4)

      Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4, announced on 22 May 2025, were hybrid models with extended thinking. Anthropic called Opus 4 the best coding model in the world, and Claude Code became generally available the same day.

    • Aug 5, 2025 Claude Opus 4.1

      Claude Opus 4.1, released on 5 August 2025, upgraded Claude Opus 4 for agentic tasks, real-world coding and reasoning, at the same price. Anthropic later succeeded it with Claude Opus 4.5.

    • Sep 29, 2025 Claude Sonnet 4.5

      Claude Sonnet 4.5, released on 29 September 2025, was a drop-in replacement for Sonnet 4 at the same price. Anthropic reported that it could stay focused on complex tasks for more than 30 hours.

    • Nov 24, 2025 Claude Opus 4.5

      Claude Opus 4.5, released on 24 November 2025, cost a third as much as Opus 4.1 per token and introduced an effort parameter that lets developers trade capability for time and cost. Claude Opus 4.6 succeeded it.

  4. 2026
    • Feb 5, 2026 Claude Opus 4.6

      Released on 5 February 2026, Claude Opus 4.6 was an upgrade to Anthropic's smartest model. It was the first Opus-class model with a 1M-token context window, in beta at launch, and it introduced agent teams in Claude Code.

    • Feb 17, 2026 Claude Sonnet 4.6

      Released on 17 February 2026 with a 1M-token context window in beta, Claude Sonnet 4.6 kept the price of Sonnet 4.5 and became the default model for Free and Pro users on claude.ai.

    • Apr 16, 2026 Claude Opus 4.7

      Released on 16 April 2026 at the same price as Opus 4.6, Claude Opus 4.7 added an xhigh effort level and accepted much larger images. It was the first model to test automatic blocking of high-risk cybersecurity requests.

    • May 28, 2026 Claude Opus 4.8

      Released on 28 May 2026 at the same price as Opus 4.7, Claude Opus 4.8 added a fast mode at 2.5 times the speed, with fewer unnoticed flaws in its own code. Anthropic called it a modest but tangible improvement.

    • Jun 30, 2026 Claude Sonnet 5

      Claude Sonnet 5, released on 30 June 2026, is Anthropic's most agentic Sonnet model. It can make plans, use browsers and terminals, and run autonomously, at an introductory price of $2 and $10 per million tokens.

    • Jul 24, 2026 Claude Opus 5

      Claude Opus 5, released on 24 July 2026 at $5 and $25 per million tokens, is Anthropic's most aligned model to date and its most capable generally available model for scientific research.

    • Sep 22, 2026 Claude Opus 5.5

      Claude Opus 5.5, released on 22 September 2026, is the first model in Anthropic's Claude 5.5 family. Anthropic said it performs at the level of Fable 5.1 on most work, at about 40% lower cost than Opus 5.

    • Sep 28, 2026 Claude Sonnet 5.5

      Claude Sonnet 5.5, released on 28 September 2026, is the second model in the Claude 5.5 family and Anthropic's fastest Sonnet to date. It costs $2 and $10 per million tokens, with cache reads halved in October 2026.

20243

  1. ReleaseAnthropic demos 'Golden Gate Claude', a model obsessed with the Golden Gate Bridge

    A 24-hour public demo in which Anthropic clamped a single internal feature — the Golden Gate Bridge — at ten times its maximum activation in Claude 3 Sonnet, so that the model steered everyday answers back to the bridge.

  2. PaperAnthropic publishes 'Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model'

    On May 21, 2024, Anthropic published research that used dictionary learning to map millions of concepts, called features, inside Claude 3 Sonnet — including one that responds to the Golden Gate Bridge.

  3. ReleaseAnthropic introduces the Claude 3 model family

    On 4 March 2024 Anthropic announced the Claude 3 family: Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, in ascending order of capability. All three added vision and launched with a 200K-token context window.

Developed by1

Anthropic

Succeeded by1

Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Successor of1

Claude 2.1

Powers1

Claude apps (claude.ai)

Uses2

TransformerConstitutional AI

Notes and sources

  1. Introducing the next generation of Claudehttps://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-family
  2. Model deprecationshttps://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/model-deprecations
  3. Claude (language model)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(language_model)

Cite this page: Claude 3 Sonnet. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/models/claude-3-sonnet. Updated 2026-11-08