Claude Opus is Anthropic's flagship — most capable, most expensive, used when reasoning quality is non-negotiable. Here's where it fits and when it's worth paying for over Sonnet.
Claude Opus is Anthropic's most capable model — used for the hardest reasoning, most complex coding, and highest-stakes writing. Slower and more expensive than Sonnet; most teams use Opus selectively for complex tasks while running Sonnet as the daily driver.
Anthropic's three-tier family: Haiku (fast, cheap), Sonnet (workhorse), Opus (flagship). Opus is the largest and most capable.
Opus is the model to reach for when you need the absolute best reasoning quality, even at higher cost and latency.
For the vast majority of business workflows — drafts, summaries, follow-up emails, content briefs, meeting notes, basic research — Sonnet matches or exceeds what you need. Reaching for Opus by default wastes money.
Opus per-token cost is meaningfully higher than Sonnet. For production workflows running thousands of calls per month, using Opus everywhere can be 3-10x more expensive than using Sonnet with selective Opus escalation.
Almost never. Default to Sonnet. Escalate specific high-stakes tasks to Opus.
Yes — Claude Team users can switch to Opus per conversation.
Yes — model selection is configurable in Claude Code.
Meaningfully on hard reasoning tasks; marginally on everyday business writing. Test with your specific workflow.
No — they serve different needs. Anthropic ships new versions of both regularly.