Curiosity · AI Model
Voyage AI voyage-3
voyage-3 is Voyage AI's general-purpose retrieval embedding model, designed explicitly for RAG pipelines. Voyage publishes domain variants — voyage-code, voyage-law, voyage-finance — plus voyage-3-lite for high-throughput workloads. Anthropic recommends Voyage for Claude-based RAG, which makes it a natural pair for enterprise agents.
Model specs
- Vendor
- Voyage AI
- Family
- Voyage 3
- Released
- 2024-09
- Context window
- 32,000 tokens
- Modalities
- text
- Input price
- $0.06/M tok
- Output price
- n/a
- Pricing as of
- 2026-04-20
Strengths
- Leads general MTEB retrieval among similarly priced models
- Domain-specialised embeddings (code, law, finance) outperform generalist models in-domain
- 32k-token input — embed long chunks without splitting
- Recommended by Anthropic for Claude-based RAG pipelines
Limitations
- Closed API-only — no open weights
- Rate limits can bite at very high ingest rates — batch carefully
- Ecosystem smaller than OpenAI or Cohere for framework integrations
Use cases
- Production RAG over enterprise knowledge bases
- Code retrieval with voyage-code-2 / voyage-code-3
- Legal and financial document search with domain variants
- Agent memory stores paired with Claude or GPT
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | As of |
|---|---|---|
| MTEB retrieval (avg NDCG@10) | ≈58 | 2024-09 |
| BEIR avg | ≈55 | 2024-09 |
Frequently asked questions
What is voyage-3?
voyage-3 is Voyage AI's flagship general-purpose text embedding model, optimised for retrieval and RAG. It ships alongside domain-specialised siblings (voyage-code, voyage-law, voyage-finance) and a cheaper voyage-3-lite tier.
Why does Anthropic recommend Voyage for Claude RAG?
Anthropic published retrieval best practices that endorse Voyage models for Claude-based RAG. Voyage's domain variants and long 32k context pair well with Claude's long-context reasoning, letting teams index big chunks and hand them to Claude at query time.
How much does voyage-3 cost?
As of April 2026, voyage-3 is priced at roughly USD 0.06 per million input tokens on the Voyage API, with voyage-3-lite offering a further discount for high-throughput workloads.
When should I pick a domain-specialised Voyage model?
If most of your corpus is code, law, or finance, the matching domain variant typically outperforms voyage-3 general by several NDCG points on in-domain queries. For mixed corpora, voyage-3 is the safer default.
Sources
- Voyage AI — voyage-3 announcement — accessed 2026-04-20
- Voyage AI — Embeddings docs — accessed 2026-04-20