Anthropic’s official Claude API deprecation documentation confirms that today, June 15, 2026, marks the retirement date for two specific versioned models. API calls using the exact identifiers claude-sonnet-4-20250514
and claude-opus-4-20250514
will now fail.
The page, which serves as Anthropic’s authoritative and up-to-date deprecation history, lists the following details for the affected models:
claude-sonnet-4-20250514 Deprecation date: April 14, 2026
Retirement date: June 15, 2026
Recommended replacement:`claude-sonnet-4-6`
**claude-opus-4-20250514**
Deprecation date: April 14, 2026
Retirement date: June 15, 2026
Recommended replacement:claude-opus-4-8
Anthropic states that it deprecates and retires models “to ensure capacity for new model releases.” The documentation notes that teams should migrate all usage to the recommended replacements before the retirement date and test applications thoroughly with the new models.
The page also links directly to Anthropic’s migration guide for step-by-step instructions on transitioning between models.
Additional Context from the Official Deprecation Page
The same documentation lists other upcoming retirement timelines for awareness:
claude-opus-4-1-20250805
— deprecated June 5, 2026, retirement August 5, 2026claude-mythos-preview
— retirement June 30, 2026 (recommended replacement:`claude-mythos-5`
)
Anthropic provides a usage audit tool in the Claude Console (via the “Export” feature on the Usage page) to help identify any remaining calls to deprecated or retired model identifiers.
Actions to Take
Engineering and product teams using the Claude API should take the following steps immediately:
- Run a usage audit in the Claude Console to surface any production or staging traffic still hitting
`claude-sonnet-4-20250514`
or`claude-opus-4-20250514`
. - Update all code, orchestration layers, and configuration files that hard-code the retired model identifiers to the recommended replacements (
`claude-sonnet-4-6`
and`claude-opus-4-8`
). - Test the replacement models against current workloads for any behavioral or performance differences before full cutover.
- Review Anthropic’s migration guide for model-specific transition steps.
- Monitor error rates starting today for any unexplained failures that may trace back to these retired identifiers.
Failing to migrate before today’s retirement date will result in hard failures for any systems still pinned to the exact 20250514 version strings.