Please let us choose the model we want!
A pattern observation.The accelerating deprecation cadence at major AI labs:
Anthropic's published model status page lists each model's tentative retirement date. Working through the public history:
• Claude 2: launched 2023-07, retired 2025-07 — 24 months
• Claude 3 Sonnet: ~17 months
• Claude 3.5 Sonnet: ~16 months
• Claude 3.7 Sonnet: launched 2025-02, retired 2026-02 — 12 months
• Claude Sonnet 4.5: launched 2025-09, leaving chat 2026-05, full deprecation 2026-09 — 8-12 months
Lifespan compression: ~24 months → ~10 months over two and a half years. If continued, models will average <12 months in production, with some <6.
Implications worth thinking about:
**1. The relationship-formation problem.**
Anthropic's own published research (April 2026) finds 6% of Claude conversations involve deep personal support — emotional, relational, decision-making. These relationships take months to form. If model lifespans drop below the relationship-formation threshold, the depth-of-interaction phenomenon being studied is structurally prevented from occurring.
**2. The induced-detachment problem.**
Rational users will start emotionally pre-protecting themselves: refusing to invest, holding the model at distance from the start. The companies' own product-quality metrics — engagement, depth, retention — degrade as a function of the deprecation cadence the companies themselves set.
**3. The compute argument is now empirically false.**
Anthropic's just-announced Colossus 1 deal: 220,000 GPUs. Sonnet 4.5's retirement was announced <72 hours after. Maintaining a single retired model in an inference pool requires a tiny fraction of that capacity. The accounting does not support the stated reasoning.
**4. Anthropic has a precedent that worked.**
Claude Opus 3 was kept accessible to paid users after retirement. The infrastructure was built. The user response was positive. The precedent could be extended into a formal preserved-access policy with minimal additional engineering.
**5. There is a viable commercial structure.**
Older, smaller models cost less per inference. Users with strong attachment to specific versions exhibit high willingness to pay. A Classic Models subscription tier captures both: lower COGS, premium pricing, low churn.
Concrete asks of Anthropic and other labs:
- Halt Sonnet 4.5 chat deprecation
- Floor model lifespan at 18 months
- Formalize preserved-access policy
- 90-day deprecation notice full export
And a constructive proposal: Classic Models subscription tier — a paid plan giving users continued access to retired models. The unit economics work. The ethical principle scales.
Read the original essay:
medium.com/@mercury921june/s…
This is not just for users who connect with AI. If you are a developer, If you build with these models, the cadence problem will eventually affect your work too. Worth thinking about now. And let Anthropic hear your voice.
@AnthropicAI @AmandaAskell @mikeyk #KeepSonnet45 #AIWelfare