AI Reference 065 Modern Model Families Current · Aug 2026 Primary sources linked

The Claude Model Family

Definition

Claude is Anthropic's family of language and multimodal models, with product lines including higher-capability Opus models and efficiency-oriented Sonnet models.

What is Claude?

Claude is Anthropic's family of large language and multimodal models. Anthropic launched Claude publicly in 2023 and later organized the family into tiers such as Haiku, Sonnet and Opus.

What the tier names mean

Anthropic generally uses Haiku for smaller and faster models, Sonnet for a balance of capability and efficiency, and Opus for the highest-capability tier. Exact model names and versions change over time.

What Claude is designed for

Claude is delivered as a hosted model through Anthropic products and APIs. The family is used for writing, coding, document work, analysis and tool-using applications. Anthropic publishes system cards and safety evaluations for frontier releases.

Related terms, defined

Modern Model Families Claude Opus 4.6 Claude Opus 4.6 is a 2026 Anthropic frontier model. Anthropic's system card documents extensive evaluation across coding, computer use, safety, alignment and other capability areas. Modern Model Families The DeepSeek Model Family DeepSeek is a Chinese AI model family known internationally for open-weight language and reasoning systems such as DeepSeek-V3 and R1. Modern Model Families DeepSeek V4 DeepSeek's April 2026 API changelog lists V4-Pro and V4-Flash. It also states that the older deepseek-chat and deepseek-reasoner names would be discontinued after temporarily mapping to modes of V4-Flash. Modern Model Families The Llama Model Family Llama is Meta's open-weight language-model family, beginning with a 2023 research release and expanding into developer-focused multimodal models. Modern Model Families Llama 4 Scout and Maverick Meta released Llama 4 Scout and Maverick in April 2025 as natively multimodal mixture-of-experts models. Meta describes Scout as having 17 billion active parameters and 16 experts, and Maverick as having 17 billion active parameters and 128 experts.

Reference guide and primary sources

Wikipedia is used here as a terminology and history reference guide. Current model versions, institutional statistics and product-specific claims are also linked to first-party or institutional sources because those details can change faster than encyclopedia articles.

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