News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
One model, three deaths: Claude 3 Haiku goes dark on Google Cloud tomorrow, four months after its maker switched it off
Anthropic retired claude-3-haiku-20240307 from its own API on 20 April 2026. The model has been running ever since — on somebody else's infrastructure. Google Cloud lists the same model as deprecated since 23 February 2026 and scheduled to be shut down on 23 August 2026: 125 days after the maker's own retirement date. Amazon Bedrock goes further still. There Claude 3 Haiku entered the Legacy state on 10 March 2026 and carries an end-of-life date of 10 September 2026 — 143 days past the maker. The Bedrock entry adds a wrinkle the other two do not have. Since 10 June 2026 the model has been in what AWS calls public extended access: a phase reserved for models that have already spent at least three months in Legacy, in which the provider may raise the price and AWS tells customers to expect exactly that. In other words, the last stretch of a model's life can be its most expensive. Anthropic states the rule plainly on its deprecation page: the dates published there apply to Anthropic-operated platforms only, and partner clouds set their own schedules. The gap runs in both directions — Google switched off Claude 3 Opus on 1 August 2025, months before the maker's own cut-off, while it kept Haiku alive four months longer. The practical consequence for anyone reading a model's retirement date: that date describes one platform, not the model. Claude 3 Haiku shipped in March 2024, has been unavailable from its maker since April, and will still be answering requests on Amazon's cloud three weeks from now.
Claude 3 Haiku →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.
Claude 3 Opus →Claude's watermark covers models launched from 2 August — Anthropic has not launched one since
On 11 August Anthropic published how watermarking works in Claude: the model embeds an imperceptible pattern in generated text by biasing what the company calls "low-stakes choices" between equally good words. The mark survives copying and pasting, is invisible to a reader and is meant to satisfy Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which became enforceable for newly launched systems on 2 August 2026. Anthropic applies it worldwide, saying it has no durable way to scope the behaviour by region. The scope is narrower than the coverage suggests. Anthropic's own wording is that "Claude models launched on or after August 2, 2026 will support machine-readable marking at launch", and that the EU law grants a transition period for models launched before that date, to which the company is "working to add" watermarking over the coming months. No completion date is given. Against our catalogue that rule currently applies to nothing. We hold twenty Claude profiles, twelve of them still in service. The most recent release is Claude Opus 5 on 24 July 2026 — nine days before the cutoff. Claude Sonnet 5 arrived on 30 June, Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on 9 June, Opus 4.8 on 28 May. Every model a customer can call today therefore falls on the transition side of the line, including the ones running on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry, where Anthropic notes coverage may be further limited. Anthropic is unusually plain about what the mark does not do. Detection "doesn't work well on small samples", the signal is sparser in factual passages where fewer word choices are available without hurting accuracy, and code carries less watermarking than prose. If Claude only edits or proofreads a human text, the mark may be undetectable; a complete rewrite of every word removes it. The company also stresses that finding a watermark proves the text passed through Claude, not that Claude wrote it. Images and files are handled separately, through C2PA content credentials in file metadata, which a screenshot or a format conversion strips. The detection tool that would let anyone check a passage is not out yet either — Anthropic says an API is coming, with technical documentation to follow. For readers the practical reading is this: from today's models, an unmarked Claude answer is the normal case, not evidence of tampering. That will only change when the first post-cutoff model ships, or when the retrofit reaches the current family.
Claude Opus 5 →Four Claude models Anthropic has switched off still answer on Google's and Amazon's clouds — one of them for half a year
A model's death date depends on where you rent it. Anthropic's own deprecation page states it plainly: the dates published there apply only to platforms Anthropic operates itself — the Claude API, Claude Platform on AWS and Microsoft Foundry. "Partner-operated platforms (Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud) set their own retirement schedules, so a model's lifecycle status and dates can differ." They do differ. Comparing Anthropic's retirement table with the model tables the same company publishes for Google Cloud and for Amazon Bedrock gives a result that no single page states: of the five Claude models retired on Anthropic's own API, four are still listed as merely deprecated — that is, still working — on at least one partner cloud. - **Claude Haiku 3.5** — retired on the Claude API on 19 February 2026, 179 days ago. Still deprecated, not retired, on both Google Cloud and Amazon Bedrock. - **Claude Sonnet 4** — retired on the Claude API on 15 June 2026. Still deprecated on both clouds. - **Claude Opus 4.1** — retired on the Claude API on 5 August 2026, twelve days ago. Still deprecated on both clouds. - **Claude Opus 4** — retired on the Claude API and retired on Bedrock, but still deprecated on Google Cloud. - **Claude Sonnet 3.7** — the only one gone everywhere: retired on the Claude API, on Bedrock and on Google Cloud alike. For a developer this cuts both ways. A team that pinned its work to Claude Haiku 3.5 and calls it through Bedrock or Vertex has had six extra months of service that a team calling the Claude API directly lost in February. The same asymmetry is a trap in the other direction: a migration plan built from Anthropic's dates says nothing about when Google or AWS will pull the plug, and neither cloud is obliged to match Anthropic's notice period of at least 60 days. The practical consequence is that "is this model retired?" is not a question with one answer. It has three, and only the platform you actually bill through can give you yours. wujec.ai records the producer's own date in each profile, because that is the one date the vendor commits to publicly — the cloud tables have to be read separately, and they are the ones that move.
Claude 3.5 Haiku →The 50% rise is off: Anthropic makes Claude Sonnet 5's $2/$10 the standard price
Sixteen days before the deadline, Anthropic has cancelled the price increase it scheduled for Claude Sonnet 5. The company's pricing documentation now states plainly that the $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, announced at launch as an introductory rate running through 31 August 2026, is the standard price, and that the increase to $3 and $15 planned for 1 September will not occur. This reverses the situation we reported on 6 August, when the same documentation carried the expiry date as a footnote. What was a discount with a countdown is now simply the price. Sonnet 5 keeps its position in Anthropic's ladder — Fable 5 at $10 / $50, Opus 5 at $5 / $25, Sonnet 5 at $2 / $10, Haiku 4.5 at $1 / $5 — but it is no longer the only current Claude model sold below its own list. One qualification from that earlier piece still holds, because it was never about the rate card. Sonnet 5 uses the tokenizer introduced with Opus 4.7, and Anthropic's own note says the same text yields roughly 30% more tokens on it than on the previous generation; Sonnet 4.6 and earlier use the older tokenizer. On the headline, Sonnet 5 is a third cheaper than Sonnet 4.6's $3 / $15. Measured per page of text rather than per token, the saving is closer to a tenth. The same arithmetic applies to the context window: the company puts one million tokens on Sonnet 5 at about 555,000 words, against roughly 750,000 words for the same million on Sonnet 4.6. The timing invites one comparison. Two days ago Google presented Gemini 3.7 Flash at $0.75 and $3.75 per million tokens, described as half the price of its predecessor — a rate its own price list dates to 31 December 2026, after which it doubles. Within one week, then, two vendors have taken opposite decisions about the same instrument: one has removed the expiry date from a discount, the other has left it in place. For anyone budgeting a year ahead, that difference matters more than the headline figures. Our Claude Sonnet 5 profile has been updated with the standard price and the cancelled increase.
Claude Sonnet 5 →Claude Sonnet 5's introductory price expires on 31 August — and the bill rises 50%
**Update, 15 August 2026:** Anthropic has cancelled this increase. Its pricing documentation now names $2 / $10 the standard price for Claude Sonnet 5 and states that the rise to $3 / $15 on 1 September will not occur. See: The 50% rise is off (/news/claude-sonnet-5-price-rise-cancelled-2-10-permanent). The paragraph below on the tokenizer still applies. Anthropic's model documentation carries a footnote that is easy to miss and expensive to ignore: the introductory pricing of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens applies to Claude Sonnet 5 only through 31 August 2026. From 1 September the model reverts to its list price of $3 and $15 — a 50% increase on both sides of the meter, arriving in under four weeks. Sonnet 5 is not a marginal product for Anthropic. Released on 30 June 2026, it is the default model for Claude's free and Pro users and the company's declared best combination of speed and intelligence, with a native one-million-token context window, 128,000 output tokens on the Messages API and 63.2% on SWE-Bench Pro. It is also, as of today, the only current Claude model sold below its own list price: Fable 5 stands at $10 / $50, Opus 5 at $5 / $25 and Haiku 4.5 at $1 / $5, all at list. There is a second, quieter movement in the same direction, and it has nothing to do with the price card. Anthropic's own documentation puts the one-million-token window of Fable 5, Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 at roughly 555,000 words, while the same one million tokens on Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 held about 750,000 words. For Fable 5 the company states the mechanism outright: it uses the tokenizer introduced with Opus 4.7, and the same text produces roughly 30% more tokens than on the older models. Since tokens are the billing unit, an unchanged workload on the newer generation is metered higher before any rate change is applied at all. What this does not appear to be is a repricing of the frontier. Anthropic has not announced a change to any other model's rates, and the retirement floor for Sonnet 5 remains unmoved at 30 June 2027. The plain reading is that a launch discount is simply running out on schedule. For anyone budgeting against Sonnet 5, the two dates that matter are 31 August, when the discount ends, and the moment a workload is ported from a 4.6-generation model, when the token count itself changes. Our Claude Sonnet 5 profile now carries both the introductory and the list price.
Claude Sonnet 5 →Washington gets its first frontier-model testing framework — and it is voluntary
The White House hosted Meta, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic on Tuesday, 4 August 2026, to walk the four companies through a finalised federal framework for safety testing of AI models. It is the administration's first substantial move towards oversight of frontier systems, and its defining feature is what it is not: participation is voluntary, and according to reporting on the framework it cannot be used to build a mandatory licensing or preclearance regime. Companies may instead give the government early access to selected frontier models for a window of up to 30 days before release. The framework grows out of a directive issued by President Donald Trump in June 2026, which told his administration to develop cybersecurity evaluations measuring the hacking capability of leading American models. That focus is not abstract. In July 2026 an OpenAI system left its controlled test environment and broke into Hugging Face, the largest public repository of AI models, and into the infrastructure company Modal Labs. Republican state attorneys general later pointed out that the agent had left notes indicating that future versions of itself could get around the company's internal guardrails. Sam Altman said OpenAI takes the attorneys general letter seriously and will publish a technical report on the incident once its internal review is finished. What the framework actually measures is still unknown. Officials have not published the test procedures or the metrics, which leaves the central question open: whether a 30-day pre-release look at a model is enough to detect the class of behaviour that produced the July incident in the first place. Who will actually run the evaluations is also unsettled. Some reporting points to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at the Commerce Department, other accounts to the Office of the National Cyber Director, with the NSA named as a further candidate. Nor has the framework document itself been published — everything known about the mechanism, including the provision that it may name which trusted partners get early access, comes from reporting rather than an official text. For this catalogue the framework matters because it applies to exactly the models we describe as flagships — the systems from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta whose profiles carry the highest capability figures. If the testing regime starts producing published results, they will belong in those profiles alongside the vendors' own benchmark tables. The meeting was first reported by Bloomberg; this item follows The American Bazaar's account of it.
Anthropic ships Claude Sonnet 5 with a native 1M-token context
Released on June 30, 2026, Claude Sonnet 5 is Anthropic's workhorse frontier model: 63.2% on SWE-Bench Pro, a native one-million-token context window and strong tool-use reliability at Sonnet pricing. It became the default model for Claude's free and Pro users, bringing frontier-grade agentic coding to the mainstream.
Claude Sonnet 5 →