Claude — Anthropic's frontier model

Claude is the model that quietly became the daily driver for serious technical work. Where GPT often feels like a clever generalist and Gemini feels like a search engine with a personality, Claude feels like a careful colleague.

The tiers

Opus — flagship. Slow, expensive, the most capable. Use when correctness matters more than speed or cost.

Sonnet — the workhorse. 80% of Opus's quality, much faster, much cheaper. Default choice for most production traffic.

Haiku — fast and cheap. Good for routing, classification, and high-volume background tasks.

Where Claude shines

• Careful reasoning — Claude pauses, plans, and explains its work. Less likely to bluff confidently.
• Code that runs — generated code from Claude tends to compile and pass tests at a higher rate than peers in our internal evals.
• Long context — handles large documents and full codebases without falling apart.
• Agent workflows — the underlying model is well-tuned for tool use, which makes Claude Code unusually effective.

Where it falls short

• Creative writing has improved but still feels measured vs. GPT's flair.
• World-knowledge breadth lags slightly on niche topics.
• Pricing on Opus is steep enough that you'll want clear ROI before defaulting to it.

Who should use it

Engineers, technical writers, and anyone whose work involves multi-step reasoning where being wrong has a cost. If you're building agents, start with Claude.