Model deprecations and retirements

Models do not live forever. Anthropic retires older ones to free capacity for new releases, and requests to a retired model fail — this is the single most common way a working Claude integration breaks without anyone touching the code.

The four states

State	Meaning
Active	Fully supported and recommended.
Legacy	No longer receiving updates. May be deprecated in future.
Deprecated	Still functional, no longer recommended. Has a named replacement and an assigned retirement date.
Retired	Gone. Requests fail.

Anthropic notifies customers with active deployments and gives at least 60 days’ notice before retiring a publicly released model.

The trap: your platform sets its own dates

The dates on Anthropic’s deprecation page apply to Anthropic-operated platforms — the Claude API, Claude Platform on AWS and Microsoft Foundry.

Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud are partner-operated and set their own retirement schedules. A model’s status and dates can differ between them. Claude Opus 4.1 is the live example: retired on the Claude API on 5 August 2026, still available on Bedrock and Google Cloud.

If you run the same model across two platforms, you have two calendars, not one.

Current status

Model	State	Tentative retirement
claude-fable-5	Active	Not sooner than 9 Jun 2027
claude-opus-5	Active	Not sooner than 24 Jul 2027
claude-opus-4-8	Active	Not sooner than 28 May 2027
claude-opus-4-7	Active	Not sooner than 16 Apr 2027
claude-opus-4-6	Active	Not sooner than 5 Feb 2027
claude-opus-4-5-20251101	Active	Not sooner than 24 Nov 2026
claude-sonnet-5	Active	Not sooner than 30 Jun 2027
claude-sonnet-4-6	Active	Not sooner than 17 Feb 2027
claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929	Active	Not sooner than 29 Sep 2026
claude-haiku-4-5-20251001	Active	Not sooner than 15 Oct 2026

Three of those are inside twelve months as of August 2026: Sonnet 4.5, Haiku 4.5 and Opus 4.5.

Retired, with replacements

Retired	Date	Replacement
claude-opus-4-1-20250805	5 Aug 2026	claude-opus-4-8
claude-sonnet-4-20250514	15 Jun 2026	claude-sonnet-4-6
claude-opus-4-20250514	15 Jun 2026	claude-opus-4-8
claude-3-haiku-20240307	20 Apr 2026	claude-haiku-4-5-20251001
claude-3-7-sonnet-20250219	19 Feb 2026	claude-sonnet-4-6
claude-3-5-haiku-20241022	19 Feb 2026	claude-haiku-4-5-20251001
claude-3-opus-20240229	5 Jan 2026	claude-opus-4-8
claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620 / 20241022	28 Oct 2025	claude-sonnet-4-6
claude-2.0, claude-2.1, claude-3-sonnet-20240229	21 Jul 2025	Opus 4.8 / Sonnet 4.6
Claude 1.x and Instant	6 Nov 2024	claude-haiku-4-5-20251001

Parameters get deprecated too

temperature, top_p and top_k are deprecated from Claude Opus 4.7 onward. They remain in the SDK request types so existing code type-checks, but setting them to a non-default value on a 4.7-or-later model returns a 400 error. Steer behaviour with prompting instead.

This is the failure mode people hit hardest when upgrading: the code compiles, the types are fine, and the API rejects the request at runtime.

Finding your exposure

The Console’s Usage page has an Export button that produces a CSV broken down by API key and model. That is the fastest way to find the one forgotten cron job still calling a model that retires next month.

What Anthropic says about the downsides

Anthropic acknowledges publicly that retirement has real costs: users lose models they preferred, researchers lose comparability, and there are safety and model-welfare risks. It has committed to long-term preservation of model weights and says it hopes to make past models publicly available again at some point.