Pair Opus as an advisor with Sonnet or Haiku as an executor, and get Opus-level intelligence in your agents at a fraction of the cost.

Claude

Anthropic introduces the advisor tool on the Claude Platform, enabling a cost-effective pattern where a smaller model (Sonnet or Haiku) acts as the executor while Claude Opus serves as an on-demand advisor. The executor handles the full task end-to-end and only escalates to Opus when it encounters decisions it cannot resolve, keeping costs near Sonnet levels while achieving near-Opus intelligence. Benchmarks show Sonnet with an Opus advisor improved 2.7 percentage points on SWE-bench Multilingual while reducing cost per task by 11.9%. Haiku with an Opus advisor more than doubled its BrowseComp score at 85% lower cost than Sonnet solo. The tool is declared as a single entry in the Messages API request with a max_uses cap, and advisor tokens are billed separately at the advisor model's rates.

The advisor strategy: Give Sonnet an intelligence boost with Opus