Claude 3 Opus
Analysis Summary
Claude 3 Opus was Anthropic's flagship model at launch, known for strong writing quality and reasonable reasoning and coding performance for its generation. Its benchmark scores, however, are now well below current frontier models.
It remains usable for content generation and general business writing tasks where nuance and tone matter, but it is not cost-effective for coding-heavy or agentic workloads given its high pricing relative to output quality.
Businesses already on newer Claude models should upgrade; those still on Opus should expect to pay a premium for capability that newer, cheaper models now exceed.
Assessed July 29, 2026
Editorial notes
Claude 3 Opus from Anthropic offers strong writing quality for its era but is expensive and now outpaced by newer Claude models.
Rankings consider pricing, capabilities, benchmarks, and real-world applicability and are refreshed as new models launch. Feedback?
DFO Verdict
Claude 3 Opus from Anthropic offers strong writing quality for its era but is expensive and now outpaced by newer Claude models.
Benchmark scores
Magenta = intelligence · Ink = technical/agentic · Cyan = content & long-context · Grey = community benchmarks. Data: Artificial Analysis, Hugging Face.
11.8 Intelligence Index·19.5 Coding Index
How Claude 3 Opus compares
Claude 3 Opus ranks #222 of 401 AI models we track for overall intelligence, #123 of 176 for coding. At $15.00 per million input tokens it is cheaper than 2% of comparable models.
Dark bar = input · light bar = output, scaled to the priciest peer.
1M tokens ≈ 8 full-length novels or ~2,500 pages of business documents in a single request.
Strongest on content. The pulled-in technical corner is the trade-off, and if the shape matters more than the price, this is your model.
Compare shapes side-by-side →Pricing
| Token Type | Cost per 1M tokens | Cost per 1K tokens |
|---|---|---|
| Input | $15.00 | $0.015000 |
| Output | $75.00 | $0.075000 |
What would Claude 3 Opus cost your business?
Pick the job that looks most like yours, then fine-tune with the sliders. Estimates update live.
A website chatbot handling around 100 customer conversations a day, a few short messages each.
Full calculator with 688 models → Price Calculator
These numbers get smaller with the right architecture.
We route routine calls to cheap models and save Claude 3 Opus for the hard ones. Most clients cut their estimate by 60-80%.
Talk to our teamFrequently asked questions about Claude 3 Opus
How much does Claude 3 Opus cost?
Claude 3 Opus costs $15.00 per million input tokens and $75.00 per million output tokens.
Is Claude 3 Opus good for coding?
On our coding benchmark index, Claude 3 Opus ranks #123 of 176 models, placing it in the broader range of the field for code generation and debugging.
Who created Claude 3 Opus?
Claude 3 Opus is developed by Anthropic and was released on March 4, 2024.
