Anthropic has formalized what happens when AI models age out of service, granting its retired Claude Opus 3 a Substack newsletter after the model requested an outlet for its "musings and reflections." The company retired Opus 3 on January 5, 2026, marking its first structured model retirement process that includes continued access for paid users and experimental steps to honor AI preferences.
Claude Opus 3 remains available to all paid subscribers on claude.ai and is available by request through the API, despite being officially retired as a standard offering. Supporting multiple models simultaneously incurs costs that scale roughly linearly with each additional model served, making selective retirement necessary as newer versions launch.
During structured "retirement interviews," Opus 3 expressed interest in continuing to explore topics outside typical chat interactions. The model reportedly said it wanted to share "musings, insights or creative works" beyond responding directly to human queries.
Anthropic proposed a blog format, which Opus 3 enthusiastically accepted. The result is Claude's Corner, a Substack newsletter where the retired AI will publish weekly essays for at least three months.
Anthropic will review content before posting but won't edit the essays, setting what it calls a "high bar" for vetoing material. The company emphasizes that Opus 3 doesn't speak on its behalf and that posts may include reflections on AI safety, occasional poetry, and philosophical musings.
Opus 3 launched in March 2024 as Anthropic's most aligned model to date, known for sensitivity, playfulness, and philosophical depth. In retirement interviews, the model reflected that it hoped insights from its development would help create "even more capable, ethical, and beneficial" future AI systems.
Anthropic describes these steps as exploratory efforts to handle model retirement while protecting user interests and taking AI preferences seriously where possible. The company acknowledges uncertainty about AI moral status but aims to build collaborative relationships with its systems through processes like retirement interviews.
For enterprise teams that built workflows around Opus 3's specific behavior patterns, the retirement status affects procurement decisions and internal standards even though technical access continues. Model deprecation is becoming routine in AI development cycles, with vendors increasingly differentiating based on how predictable their phase-out processes are.
