Curiosity · AI Model
Claude 3 Sonnet
Claude 3 Sonnet is the original Sonnet, released March 2024 as the balanced middle tier of the Claude 3 family. It offered GPT-4-adjacent quality at roughly 1/5 the cost of Opus — but was quickly overshadowed when Claude 3.5 Sonnet launched three months later with much better coding and tool-use performance.
Model specs
- Vendor
- Anthropic
- Family
- Claude 3
- Released
- 2024-03
- Context window
- 200,000 tokens
- Modalities
- text, vision, code
- Input price
- $3/M tok
- Output price
- $15/M tok
- Pricing as of
- 2026-04-20
Strengths
- First Claude tier priced for production-scale deployment
- Decent 200K context for its generation
- Clean instruction following and refusal behaviour
Limitations
- Superseded three months after launch by Claude 3.5 Sonnet
- No tool use, no JSON mode, no extended thinking
- Largely deprecated on Anthropic's own surfaces by 2025-26
Use cases
- Cost-sensitive chat apps (2024 era)
- Multi-turn support agents
- Document summarisation at moderate cost
- Legacy pipelines still pinned to this model
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | As of |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | ≈79% | 2024-03 |
| HumanEval | ≈73% | 2024-03 |
| GPQA (graduate) | ≈40% | 2024-03 |
Frequently asked questions
What is Claude 3 Sonnet?
Claude 3 Sonnet is the original mid-tier model in Anthropic's Claude 3 family, released March 2024. It was designed to balance cost and quality, sitting between Claude 3 Haiku and Claude 3 Opus.
Is Claude 3 Sonnet still worth using?
No — for any new project, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 4.5, or even Claude 3.5 Sonnet is a clear upgrade at similar cost. Claude 3 Sonnet is maintained for legacy compatibility, not for active development.
How much did Claude 3 Sonnet cost?
Claude 3 Sonnet was priced at USD 3 per million input tokens and USD 15 per million output tokens — the pricing anchor that the Claude 3.5, 3.7, and 4 Sonnet tiers have maintained.
What is the difference between Claude 3 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Sonnet?
Claude 3.5 Sonnet (June 2024) was a major upgrade at the same price point — substantially better coding, reasoning, and tool use. It also added the computer-use preview later in 2024. Claude 3 Sonnet is effectively the ancestor.
Sources
- Anthropic — Claude 3 family — accessed 2026-04-20
- Anthropic — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-20