Anthropic unveiled the Claude 3 model family with three tiers for the first time: the lightweight Haiku, the balanced Sonnet, and the flagship Opus. Opus and Sonnet launched on March 4, with Haiku following on March 13. The family added native vision, handling images alongside text.

Anthropic said Claude 3 Opus beat GPT-4 and Gemini 1.0 Ultra on several common benchmarks, the first time a Claude model claimed the outright frontier lead. The three-tier structure let developers trade cost, speed, and intelligence per task.

Claude 3 cemented the family-and-tiers naming that Anthropic kept through every subsequent generation, and made multimodality standard across the lineup.