Obituaries · Anthropic
claude-3-opus-20240229, 2024–2026
Retired by Anthropic
The big Claude of 2024, loved by the people who asked it hard questions and feared by the people who paid for them.
claude-3-opus-20240229, an Anthropic model that answered questions, wrote emails and was blamed for both, was switched off on January 5, 2026, aged 1 year and 10 months. The death was announced 6 months in advance, on June 30, 2025, on a deprecations page that most of its users never opened. Calls to its ID are now expected to fail.
Its work passes to claude-opus-4-8, which the family describes as 'recommended'.
Last seen alive
In a scan of the 60 most-starred LLM repositories on GitHub (November 5, 2026), this code still names it:
- FoundationAgents/MetaGPT (71,182 stars) ·
config/examples/anthropic-claude-3-5-sonnet.yaml
| Model ID | claude-3-opus-20240229 |
|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic deprecations page |
| Born | February 29, 2024 |
| Announced | June 30, 2025 |
| Shut down | January 5, 2026 |
| Successor | claude-opus-4-8 |
In lieu of flowers
Replace the string. Search your code for claude-3-opus-20240229 and swap it for claude-opus-4-8, or paste a repo into Model Graveyard Check to find every dead model at once.
Want to say something to it? Leave a letter on the farewell wall.
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Technical notice, with a code scanner: claude-3-opus-20240229 on Model Graveyard Check