Anthropic switched four models off its own API and kept their prices. They cost three times the model that replaced them

A model can be switched off in two different places, and Anthropic's own documents show how far apart those places can be. The company's deprecation page is unambiguous: claude-opus-4-20250514 and claude-sonnet-4-20250514 were retired on 15 June 2026, claude-opus-4-1-20250805 on 5 August 2026, and claude-3-5-haiku-20241022 back on 19 February 2026. On the Claude API they cannot be called at all. The price list, checked on 22 September 2026, still carries all four. Each one is labelled — Opus 4.1, Sonnet 4 and Haiku 3.5 as retired “except on Bedrock and Google Cloud”, Opus 4 as retired “except on Google Cloud” — and each keeps a full set of rates: base input, both cache write tiers, cache hits, output, and separate batch pricing. These are not historical footnotes. They are the prices a customer pays today, through a partner cloud. What that produces is an inverted ladder. Claude Opus 4 and Opus 4.1 are billed at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output. Claude Opus 5, Opus 4.8, 4.7, 4.6 and 4.5 — every newer model in the line — are billed at $5 and $25. The two models Anthropic no longer serves itself are three times the price of the five it does, and the gap widens on batch work, where the retired pair costs $7.50 per million input against $2.50 for the current generation. The explanation is mundane: those rates were set in 2025 and never revised, because for Anthropic the products are finished. Nothing forces a price cut on a model you have stopped selling. But the consequence is not mundane for anyone still running production traffic on Opus 4.1 in Bedrock or Vertex: the upgrade path is not a cost, it is a two-thirds discount. One detail does not line up. Anthropic's price list flags Haiku 3.5 as still available on Google Cloud, while Google Cloud published a shutdown date of 5 July 2026 for that model. On a page the vendor maintains itself, the partner availability note has apparently outlived the partner's own schedule — one more reason to read a price list as a statement of intent rather than a live inventory.