Claude 3 Opus (2024-02-29) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05)

Name: Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05)
Brand: Anthropic
Price: 5.000000 USD

Claude 3 Opus (2024-02-29) vs Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05): Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05) is cheaper by 67% on average. Claude 3 Opus (2024-02-29) from Anthropic (200,000-token context, tool calls) vs. Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05) from Anthropic (1,000,000-token context, reasoning, tool calls). Use Agent Command Center to A/B both in shadow mode and pick the winner per workload.

Side-by-side cost

Live workload comparison

Same workload run through both models. The cheaper one is highlighted.

Input tokens / request3,000

01,000,000

Output tokens / request400

0128,000

Requests / day5,000

01,000,000

Claude 3 Opus (2024-02-29)

Anthropic

$11,414/mo

Input $15.00/M · Output $75.00/M

Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05)Cheaper

Anthropic

$3,805/mo

Input $5.00/M · Output $25.00/M

At this workload, Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05) is 67% cheaper than Claude 3 Opus (2024-02-29) — a savings of $7,609/month ($91,313/year).

Production recipe — Agent Command Center

strategy: cost-optimized
primary:
  model: claude-opus-4-6-20260205
  provider: anthropic
fallback:
  model: claude-3-opus-20240229
  provider: anthropic
shadow: { sample_rate: 0.05 }   # mirror 5% of traffic to compare quality live

Get started free →Routing docs ↗

	Claude 3 Opus (2024-02-29) Anthropic	Claude Opus 4.6 (2026-02-05) Anthropic
Input price	$15.00/M	$5.00/M
Output price	$75.00/M	$25.00/M
Context window	200,000	1,000,000
Max output	4,096	128,000
Function calling	✓	✓
Vision	✓	✓
Audio input	—	—
Reasoning	—	✓
Prompt caching	✓	✓
Structured output	✓	✓
Pricing verified	May 12, 2026	May 12, 2026