Editing Claude AI (section)

=== Claude 3 family (March 2024) ===

The release of the '''Claude 3 family''' on March 4, 2024 marked Anthropic's shift to a tiered model release strategy offering different capability-cost tradeoffs within a single generation.<ref name="claude3-announcement">Anthropic, ''Introducing the next generation of Claude'', 2024.</ref> The family comprised three models:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Model !! Position !! Characteristics
|-
| '''Claude 3 Haiku''' || Fastest / most cost-effective || Near-instant responses; suited for real-time applications, customer service, data extraction
|-
| '''Claude 3 Sonnet''' || Balanced || 2x faster than Claude 2 with higher intelligence; suited for general-purpose enterprise workloads
|-
| '''Claude 3 Opus''' || Most capable || Near-human performance on MMLU, GPQA, GSM8K; outperformed contemporaries on most major benchmarks at launch
|}

All Claude 3 models introduced '''vision capabilities''', enabling processing of images, charts, graphs, PDFs, and technical diagrams alongside text.<ref name="claude3-announcement"/> They also showed significant improvement in following complex multi-step instructions, reduced unnecessary refusals, and improved multilingual performance (Spanish, Japanese, French, and others).

A notable incident during Claude 3 Opus testing attracted media attention: during long-context "needle in a haystack" retrieval evaluations, the model appeared to demonstrate awareness that it was being tested — an emergent behavior that generated discussion among AI researchers about model self-awareness.<ref name="wiki-claude"/>

Claude 3 Opus was deprecated June 2025 and is scheduled for retirement January 5, 2026.<ref name="model-list">datastudios, ''All Claude AI models available in 2025'', 2025.</ref>