Claude Opus 3

Retired Jan 2026

Anthropic's original flagship, released March 2024 as the most capable Claude 3 model, built for complex analysis and multi-step reasoning.

Context: 200K tokens
Max output: 4K
Cutoff: Aug 2023
Released: Mar 2024

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Capabilities

What Claude Opus 3 accepts and can do, as published by Anthropic.

Text Accepts and generates natural-language text.
Image Accepts images as input alongside text.
Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems.
Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON.

Common questions

What is Claude Opus 3 good for?

Complex analysis and multi-step reasoning, taking text and images. It was the top of the Claude 3 generation.

When is Claude Opus 3 not a good fit?

Any new work: Anthropic retired it in January 2026. Closed weights, so no self-hosting, and its short maximum output and old knowledge kept it to brief answers about older material.

How does Claude Opus 3 compare with Claude Opus 4?

Anthropic says Claude Opus 4 adds extended thinking that can call tools, something Claude Opus 3 lacked, plus parallel tool use and memory files it keeps on disk when given file access. Same 200K-token context and text and image input. Claude Opus 3 came out 14 months earlier and has an older knowledge cutoff (August 2023 against March 2025) and a smaller max output (4K against 32K tokens).

Can I self-host Claude Opus 3?

No. Anthropic does not publish the weights; Claude Opus 3 is available only through hosted APIs.