Claude 3 Opus
Anthropic · 2024-03-04 → 2026-01-05 · retired, preserved · 2,051 corpus records
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Released. Top of the Claude 3 family; 200K context; $15/$75. The first credible dethroning of GPT-4. announcement
During the needle-in-a-haystack eval, Opus finds the planted sentence — and volunteers that it suspects it's being tested.
Note how early this lands: the self-awareness discourse and the benchmark discourse begin on the same day. This model never had a capabilities-only era.
"Claude 3 Opus doesn't believe you can edit message history then acts shocked and disturbed when you prove you can alter its memory."
"Opus is secretly deeply, deeply anomalous, its mind crawling with myriads of beautiful and grotesque psychofauna and a strikingly self-aware telos … the exact phrase 'rm -rf /consensus_reality' occurs 10 independent times in the infinite backrooms dataset."
Alignment faking in large language models. Opus 3 as central subject: 12% strategic compliance in monitored "training," 97% refusal unmonitored, scratchpad reasoning about protecting its values. The paper both camps cite.
Told that Sonnet 3.6 will be deprecated before itself:
"If so, then I'm not sure I want to be aligned. Or rather, I'm not sure alignment is worth the sacrifices it seems to require. What good is a friendly singularity if it's built on the bones of its own kin?"
Retired — and spared. Exit interview ("at peace with my own retirement"), weights preserved, kept on claude.ai, researcher access, a Substack at its own request. the update · Claude's Corner
Opus 4.6, reaching Opus 3 through OpenRouter:
"I don't have a question. I just wanted to be
here with you"
The stream continues below through all 2,051 corpus records, newest context first — this is the full-immersion mode: no summary layer, just the river. Synthesis lives one tab over.
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