Thinking about these retire­ments, which are hap­pening fre­quently now, I wondered: are old models, files on disk, worth anything? Is there any price at which Anthropic could sell the weights to Claude 3 Sonnet?

The answer seems obvi­ously to be “yes” but, beyond that … ? Clearly they couldn’t sell it for $100 million. Clearly they’d sell it for more than $100,000. My clarity ends there. You could tell me any number in that range and I would nod sagely and say “of course”.

— Robin Sloan, What’s an old AI model worth?, 2025