Claude is the family of large language models from Anthropic, available through the Claude API and on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry. Models come in tiers: Haiku (fastest), Sonnet (balanced), Opus (most capable for everyday work) and, since 2026, Fable for the hardest reasoning and long-horizon tasks.
The current generation is Claude Opus 5.5 (September 2026), Sonnet 5.5, Haiku 5.5 and Fable 5.2 (November 2026). All of them take text and images, use tools, think adaptively before answering, and have a 1M-token context window with up to 128K output tokens. Anthropic recommends starting with Opus 5.5 for most workloads.
Anthropic publishes a status for every model: active, legacy, deprecated or retired. Each active model lists a “not sooner than” retirement date, so far about one year after launch, and customers get at least 60 days’ notice before a public model is retired. The lifecycle table on this page tracks those dates.