Claude API Deadlines — What to Migrate Before It Breaks

Three Claude API deprecations hit between April 19 and June 15, 2026. Here's the plain-English checklist: what's breaking, what to swap it to, and what you can ignore.

Last updated: Apr 18, 2026

⚠ Skip this page if you only use Claude in the web app or desktop app. These deadlines only affect the Claude API. If you're a knowledge worker using claude.ai, Projects, Artifacts, or the Claude Desktop app, you don't need to do anything. Send this page to your dev team instead.

Do you need to read this?

  • Yes — if you have API code that calls Claude (backend services, scripts, agents, integrations).
  • Yes — if your product uses Anthropic's API through Bedrock, Vertex AI, or Foundry.
  • No — if you only use Claude through claude.ai, the Desktop app, Cowork, or Claude Code interactively.
  • No — if someone else on your team owns your Claude API integration.

The three deadlines at a glance

Sunday, April 19, 2026 Apr 19, 2026

Haiku 3 retires from the API

Requests to claude-3-haiku-20240307 will start returning errors on Sunday. If you have this model ID anywhere in your codebase, CI/CD config, or infrastructure, swap it out before the weekend.

claude-3-haiku-20240307 claude-haiku-4-5-20251001

What to check: grep your repos for the old model string. Check Bedrock/Vertex configs. Run a staging test with the new model ID before Sunday — Haiku 4.5 is near-frontier intelligence at Haiku speed, but output formatting can shift subtly.

Official migration guide →

Thursday, April 30, 2026 Apr 30, 2026

1M token context beta expires for Sonnet 4 and Sonnet 4.5

The context-1m-2025-08-07 beta header stops working for Sonnet 4 and Sonnet 4.5. Requests over 200k tokens will return an error after April 30.

Good news: Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6+ have 1M context built in at standard pricing — no beta header needed. Just update the model ID and drop the header.

model: claude-sonnet-4-20250514 + betas: ["context-1m-2025-08-07"] model: claude-sonnet-4-6 (no beta header)

What to check: search your API calls for context-1m-2025-08-07. Every one of those call sites needs to swap model and drop the header. Test long-context retrieval quality after the swap — 1M capacity doesn't mean throw everything in. Relevance still matters.

Monday, June 15, 2026 Jun 15, 2026

Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 retire

Anthropic deprecated both models on April 14, 2026. They keep running until June 15 — plenty of runway, but don't wait until the last week. Start rolling production traffic over now.

claude-sonnet-4-20250514 claude-sonnet-4-6
claude-opus-4-20250514 claude-opus-4-7

Heads up on Opus 4.7: Anthropic notes Opus 4.7 may require prompt tweaks compared to Opus 4. It's a stronger model — better self-verification, better vision, better long-running agent behavior — but your existing Opus 4 prompts weren't necessarily tuned for it. Test before you ship.

Opus 4.7 announcement · Deprecation guide →

The 5-minute migration checklist

  1. Grep every repo for claude-3-haiku-20240307, claude-sonnet-4-20250514, claude-opus-4-20250514, and context-1m-2025-08-07.
  2. For each hit: replace the model ID or drop the header per the table above.
  3. Run your existing eval suite or golden test cases against the new models in staging.
  4. Pay attention to output formatting diffs — especially prompts that depend on specific token counts or structured JSON.
  5. Roll canary traffic to 10% for 24 hours, watch error rates and output quality, then promote to 100%.
  6. Delete the betas: ["context-1m-2025-08-07"] config once everything is on Sonnet 4.6 or Opus 4.7.
  7. Document the swap in your team's runbook so the next deprecation is faster.

What you don't need to do

If you're only using Claude in the web app (claude.ai), Projects, Cowork, or the Desktop app: nothing. Anthropic manages model selection on your behalf in those surfaces. You're already on the latest models.

If you're using Claude Code: nothing. Claude Code picks models automatically based on the task — it's already migrated.

If you're on Enterprise with SSO + managed models: check with your admin, but most Enterprise deployments auto-migrate.

One more thing

Deprecations are going to keep happening. Anthropic ships a new flagship model roughly every two months, and older models get retired on a ~6–12 month cycle. The fastest teams build one migration runbook once and reuse it each cycle. If this page helped, we'll keep it current — bookmark it.

Keep going

The full path to Claude as a work OS.

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