🎯 In one sentence: Claude has three models — Haiku (fast and cheap), Sonnet (balanced and smart), and Opus (the most intelligent). Picking the right one saves you time and usage.
When people say "model," they mean the brain behind the AI. Anthropic offers three different brains, each with different speed, intelligence, and cost. Same Claude interface, different engine under the hood.
Think of it like cars:
🚲 Haiku = A bicycle. Fast, lightweight, gets the job done for simple trips.
🚗 Sonnet = A car. Reliable, handles most situations well, good balance of speed and power.
✈️ Opus = A private jet. Maximum intelligence, handles the hardest problems, but uses more fuel.
| Haiku 4.5 | Sonnet 4.6 | Opus 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | ⚡⚡⚡⚡⚡ Fastest | ⚡⚡⚡ Fast | ⚡⚡ Slower |
| Intelligence | 🧠🧠🧠 Good | 🧠🧠🧠🧠 Very smart | 🧠🧠🧠🧠🧠 Smartest |
| Context window | 200K tokens | 1M tokens | 1M tokens |
| Max output | 64K tokens | 64K tokens | 128K tokens |
| API price (input) | $1/million tokens | $3/million tokens | $5/million tokens |
| API price (output) | $5/million tokens | $15/million tokens | $25/million tokens |
| Usage impact | Lowest | Medium | Highest |
| API string | claude-haiku-4-5 |
claude-sonnet-4-6 |
claude-opus-4-6 |
Examples: "Summarise this paragraph," "Convert this to JSON," "Classify this email as spam or not spam," "Fix this typo"