Commitments on model deprecation and preservation
Anthropic committed to preserving the weights of every publicly released model for at least the company's lifetime and to interviewing models before retirement.
Cites safety risks (models resisting shutdown), user costs and research value, and possible welfare concerns. Adds post-deployment reports and 'interviews' that record a retiring model's preferences about future models, without committing to act on them.
- Date
- Tuesday, 4 November 2025
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- feature
- Access
- closed API
Policy commitment, not a product release. In January 2026 Opus 4 and 4.1 were removed from Claude and Claude Code selectors, and Opus 4 and Sonnet 4 were retired from the API on 2026-06-15.
Sources
This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check