In the announcement for Opus 5, Anthropic demoed an interactive visualization of a car in a wind tunnel. Clearly the next logical question is: can Opus 5 build an interactive visualization of Herod’s Temple complex in Jerusalem during the time of Christ?
Yes, it can. Try the interactive 3D model of Herod’s Temple it made and grab the source code to improve it.
My prompt was simple, just asking it to build a historically accurate, interactive, 3D reconstruction of the Temple. It created the model and added the interactive tour elements itself. It took about twelve hours of computate time over 25 revisions to repair geometry and (my favorite) animate the fire/smoke effect. It came up on its own with the idea of letting you change the time of day. The code is well beyond my ability and desire to understand. My revisions were mostly variations on saying, “This looks wrong. Fix it,” which is how we debug in July 2026.
The model is probably wrong on some details, though Claude argued eloquently for why it was right and scholars were wrong (such as the orientation of the steps from the plaza into the Antonia Fortress in the northwest and the existence of a causeway across the Kidron). The beauty of using an LLM and open-sourcing the code is that you can just feed it new research papers as they’re published and ask it to apply the findings to the model.
It also includes views of New Testament events that happened at the Temple, together with verse references. Claude’s text is rife with its aggressively precise tone (“Every arch ring needs its spandrel”), and I didn’t review every word it wrote. It also enjoys narrating its whole journey of discovery in code comments.
Some views:
