Anthropic, a leading provider of AI solutions, offers a suite of powerful generative AI models known as Claude. These models are capable of performing various tasks, including image captioning, email writing, math problem-solving, and coding challenges.

As Anthropic’s model ecosystem continues to expand rapidly, it can be challenging to keep track of the different capabilities of each Claude model. To address this, we have created a comprehensive guide to Claude, which will be regularly updated to reflect new models and upgrades.

Claude Models

The Claude models are named after notable literary works, including Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. The latest models in the series are:

• Claude 3.5 Haiku, a lightweight model designed for efficient processing.
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a mid-range, hybrid reasoning model that currently serves as Anthropic’s flagship AI model.
• Claude 3 Opus, a large-scale model with advanced capabilities.

Interestingly, the largest and most expensive model, Claude 3 Opus, is currently the least capable of the Claude models. However, this is expected to change with the release of an updated version of Opus.

Recently, Anthropic launched Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its most advanced model to date. This AI model differs from Claude 3.5 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus in that it employs a hybrid AI reasoning approach, enabling it to provide both real-time answers and more thoughtful, deliberated responses to questions.

When utilizing Claude 3.7 Sonnet, users have the option to activate the model’s reasoning capabilities, which prompt the model to “think” for a short or extended period before responding.

During this reasoning phase, Claude 3.7 Sonnet breaks down the user’s prompt into smaller components and verifies its answers, resulting in a more accurate and informed response.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is Anthropic’s first AI model to incorporate reasoning, a technique that many AI labs have adopted as traditional methods of improving AI performance reach their limits.

Even with its reasoning capabilities disabled, Claude 3.7 Sonnet remains one of the top-performing AI models in the industry.

In November, Anthropic released an enhanced version of its lightweight AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku. Although this model outperforms Claude 3 Opus on several benchmarks, it lacks the ability to analyze images like Claude 3 Opus or Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

All Claude models, which have a standard 200,000-token context window, can follow multi-step instructions, utilize tools (such as stock trackers), and generate structured output in formats like JSON.

A context window refers to the amount of data a model like Claude can analyze before generating new data, while tokens represent subdivided bits of raw data (such as the syllables “fan,” “tas,” and “tic” in the word “fantastic”). A 200,000-token context window is equivalent to approximately 150,000 words or a 600-page novel.

Unlike many major generative AI models, Anthropic’s models do not have internet access, which limits their ability to answer questions about current events. Additionally, they are incapable of generating images, except for simple line diagrams.

The primary differences between the Claude models lie in their capabilities: Claude 3.7 Sonnet is faster than Claude 3 Opus and better understands nuanced and complex instructions, while Haiku struggles with sophisticated prompts but is the swiftest of the three models.

Claude Model Pricing

The Claude models are available through Anthropic’s API and managed platforms such as Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.

The pricing for the Anthropic API is as follows:

• Claude 3.5 Haiku costs $0.80 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) or $4 per million output tokens.
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet costs $3 per million input tokens or $15 per million output tokens.
• Claude 3 Opus costs $15 per million input tokens or $75 per million output tokens.

Anthropic offers prompt caching and batching to provide additional runtime savings.

Prompt caching allows developers to store specific “prompt contexts” that can be reused across API calls to a model, while batching processes asynchronous groups of low-priority (and subsequently cheaper) model inference requests.

Claude Plans and Apps

For individual users and companies looking to interact with the Claude models via web, Android, and iOS apps, Anthropic offers a free Claude plan with rate limits and usage restrictions.

Upgrading to one of the company’s subscriptions removes these limits and unlocks new functionality. The current plans include:

Claude Pro, which costs $20 per month, comes with 5x higher rate limits, priority access, and previews of upcoming features.

The Team plan, which costs $30 per user per month, is business-focused and includes a dashboard for controlling billing and user management, as well as integrations with data repositories such as codebases and customer relationship management platforms (e.g., Salesforce). A toggle enables or disables citations to verify AI-generated claims.

Both Pro and Team subscribers have access to Projects, a feature that grounds Claude’s outputs in knowledge bases, which can include style guides, interview transcripts, and more. These customers, along with free-tier users, can also utilize Artifacts, a workspace where users can edit and add to content generated by Claude, such as code, apps, website designs, and other documents.

For customers requiring more advanced features, there is Claude Enterprise, which allows companies to upload proprietary data into Claude for analysis and question-answering. Claude Enterprise also includes a larger context window (500,000 tokens), GitHub integration for syncing repositories with Claude, and access to Projects and Artifacts.

A Word of Caution

As with all generative AI models, there are risks associated with using Claude.

The models may occasionally make mistakes when summarizing or answering questions due to their tendency to hallucinate. They are also trained on public web data, some of which may be copyrighted or under a restrictive license. While Anthropic and other AI vendors argue that the fair-use doctrine protects them from copyright claims, this has not stopped data owners from filing lawsuits.

Anthropic offers policies to shield certain customers from courtroom battles arising from fair-use challenges. However, these policies do not resolve the ethical concerns surrounding the use of models trained on data without permission.

This article was originally published on October 19, 2024, and was updated on February 25, 2025, to include new information about Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku.