flagship tier in Anthropic's lineup. Here's when the price actually makes sense, and when you're better off downgrading.
Complex reasoning, critical decisions, one-shot high-stakes outputs. Typically the right pick for 5-10% of workloads.
Classification, summarization, simple Q&A, most agentic sub-steps. Sonnet or Haiku wins on cost for 90%+ of tasks.
Most teams running Claude Opus 24/7 are over-using the tier. Audit reveals which requests actually needed this model and which would have worked on the tier below. Run the free audit →
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