News
What's happening in robotics and AI — curated by the wujec.ai editors.
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 →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 →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 →