Claude Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 Retirement Deadline Hits This Weekend

Anthropic will retire the original Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 models from the API on June 15, 2026 — just two days from now.

The company first announced the deprecations on April 14, 2026. Both models have been in deprecated status since then, and API calls to the old identifiers will stop working after the retirement date.

Retirement Details

• Claude Opus 4 (claude-opus-4-20250514)
  Deprecated: April 14, 2026
  Retirement: June 15, 2026
  Recommended replacement: claude-opus-4-8
• Claude Sonnet 4 (claude-sonnet-4-20250514)
  Deprecated: April 14, 2026
  Retirement: June 15, 2026
  Recommended replacement: claude-sonnet-4-6

Official Confirmation

From Anthropic’s April 14, 2026 release notes:

“We announced the deprecation of the Claude Sonnet 4 model (claude-sonnet-4-20250514) and the Claude Opus 4 model (claude-opus-4-20250514), with retirement on the Claude API scheduled for June 15, 2026.”

Full details and current status are available on the official Model Deprecations page:
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/model-deprecations

What Developers Should Do

Teams still using the original claude-opus-4-20250514 or claude-sonnet-4-20250514 model IDs need to update their code immediately. There is no grace period after June 15 — requests to the retired models will return errors.

Anthropic has directed users to migrate to the newer versions listed above. The company’s Migration Guide also covers related changes, including updates to sampling parameters on newer Opus models.

With the deadline now just 48 hours away, developers are encouraged to test and switch before Sunday.