Google Cloud gives a dying model exactly six months' notice — except the one it switched off in 32 days

Google Cloud publishes one page listing every partner model it has deprecated, each with the date it was marked for withdrawal and the date it goes dark. Read as a table rather than as separate announcements, the page reveals a rule the company never states: the gap between the two dates is always about six months. We measured all eight entries. Claude 3 Haiku was deprecated on 23 February 2026 and shuts down on 23 August 2026 — 181 days. Claude 3.5 Haiku: 5 January to 5 July 2026, also 181 days. Claude 3.7 Sonnet: 11 November 2025 to 11 May 2026, 181 days again. Both Claude 3.5 Sonnet snapshots ran 183 days, and AI21's Jamba 1.5 Large and Mini got 184 each. Seven of the eight land within three days of each other. The eighth is Claude 3 Opus. Google marked it deprecated on 30 June 2025 and switched it off on 1 August 2025 — **32 days**. Anthropic's most expensive model of its generation received one sixth of the notice that a small, cheap Haiku model received seven months later. What makes that number legible is the comparison with Anthropic's own schedule for the same model. Anthropic deprecated Claude 3 Opus on 30 June 2025 — the same day Google did — and retired it on its own API on 5 January 2026. Same starting gun, two very different races: 189 days at Anthropic, 32 at Google. By the time the model stopped answering on the Claude API, it had been dead on Google Cloud for 157 days. That inverts the pattern we described here yesterday, where partner clouds kept retired Claude models alive for months after Anthropic had switched them off. The direction of the gap is not a property of the platform. It is decided case by case, and a developer cannot infer one schedule from the other. There is a practical reading for anyone still holding a deprecated model on Vertex. Six months has been the working convention for every partner model deprecated since the middle of 2025, which is more than the 60 days Anthropic commits to on its own API. But Claude 3 Opus is the counter-example that stops six months from being a promise: nothing on Google's page describes a notice period, guarantees one, or explains why one model got 32 days. What these numbers do not show: the sample is small — eight models from three vendors — and it covers only models Google has already deprecated. Google may have had a specific reason for the Opus 3 timetable, such as capacity or a contract term, that its documentation does not record. And the deprecation page is the only public trace of these dates; customers on those models are notified separately, and we cannot see what they were told or when.