Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5: A Smaller, Faster AI Model Rivaling Its Larger Counterparts

Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 matches May's frontier model at fraction of cost

On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, a small AI language model that reportedly delivers performance similar to what its frontier model Claude Sonnet 4 achieved five months ago but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. The new model is available now to all Claude app, web, and API users. If the benchmarks for Haiku 4.5 reported by Anthropic hold up to independent testing, the fact that the company can match some capabilities of its cutting-edge coding model from only five months ago (and GPT-5 in coding) while providing a dramatic speed increase and cost cut is notable. As a recap, Anthropic ships the Claude family in three model sizes: Haiku (small), Sonnet (medium), and Opus (large). The larger models are based on larger neural networks and typically include deeper contextual knowledge but are slower and more expensive to run. Due to a technique called distillation, companies like Anthropic have been able to craft smaller-sized AI models that match the capability of larger, older models at functional tasks like coding, although it typically comes at the cost of omitting stored knowledge. That means if you wanted to converse with an AI model that might craft a deeper and more meaningful analysis of, say, foreign policy or world history, you might be better served talking to Sonnet or Opus (being aware that they can also be wrong and make things up). But if you just need quick coding assistance that's more about translation of concepts than general knowledge, Haiku might be the better pick due to its speed and lower cost. And speaking of cost, Haiku 4.5 is included for subscribers of Claude web and app plans. Through the API (for developers), the small model is priced at $1-per-million input tokens and $5-per-million output tokens. That compares to Sonnet 4.5 at $3-per-million input and $15-per-million output tokens, and Opus 4.1 at $15-per-million input and a whopping $75-per-million output tokens. The model serves as a cheaper drop-in replacement for two older models, Haiku 3.5 and Sonnet 4. "Users who rely on AI for real-time, low-latency tasks like chat assistants, customer service agents, or pair programming will appreciate Haiku 4.5's combination of high intelligence and remarkable speed," Anthropic writes. On SWE-bench Verified, a test that measures performance on coding tasks, Haiku 4.5 scored 73.3 percent compared to Sonnet 4's similar performance level (72.7 percent). The model also reportedly surpasses Sonnet 4 at certain tasks like using computers, according to Anthropic's benchmarks. Claude Sonnet 4.5, released in late September, remains Anthropic's frontier model and what the company calls "the best coding model available." Haiku 4.5 also surprisingly edges up close to what OpenAI's GPT-5 can achieve in this particular set of benchmarks (as seen in the chart above), although since the results are self-reported and potentially cherry-picked to match a model's strengths, one should always take them with a grain of salt. Still, making a small, capable coding model may have unexpected advantages for agentic coding setups like Claude Code. Anthropic designed Haiku 4.5 to work alongside Sonnet 4.5 in multi-model workflows. In such a configuration, Anthropic says, Sonnet 4.5 could break down complex problems into multi-step plans, then coordinate multiple Haiku 4.5 instances to complete subtasks in parallel, like spinning off workers to get things done faster. For more details on the new model, Anthropic released a system card and documentation for developers.

Anthropic launches new version of scaled-down "Haiku" model | TechCrunch

On Wednesday, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, the newest version of its smallest model, billed as offering similar performance to Sonnet 4 "at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed," per a company blog post. While the Anthropic sites a range of new benchmark results to back up those performance claims. In the company's testing, Haiku scored 73% on SWE-Bench verified and 41% on the command-line-focused Terminal-Bench -- below Sonnet 4.5, but on par with Sonnet 4, GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 in each case. Tests show similar results on benchmarks for tool use, computer use, and visual reasoning. The new version of Haiku will become the default for all free Anthropic plans and the company believes it will be particularly appealing for free versions of AI products, where it can provide significant capabilities while minimizing server loads. The lightweight nature of the model also means it's easier to deploy multiple Haiku agents in parallel or in combination with a more sophisticated model. In a statement to press, Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger said the Haiku would make new styles of deployment possible in production for the first time. "It's is opening up entirely new categories of what's possible with AI in production environments - with Sonnet handling complex planning while Haiku-powered sub-agents execute at speed," Krieger said. "We're giving people a complete agent toolbox where each model has the right combination of intelligence, speed, and cost for different parts of the job." The most immediate applications are likely to come in software development tools, where Claude Code is already commonly used and latency is often a critical factor. In statements provided by Anthropic, Zencoder CEO Andrew Filev described the new version of Haiku as "unlocking an entirely new set of use cases." Haiku 4.5 comes after a string of high-profile launches for Anthropic: just two weeks after the launch of Sonnet 4.5 and two months after the launch of Opus 4.1, both of which were hailed as state-of-the-art on release. The previous version of Haiku was released in October 2024.

Anthropic Launches Smaller, Faster Claude Haiku 4.5 AI Model

The newest Claude generative AI model, called Haiku 4.5, has the same coding ability of the company's Sonnet 4 model in a smaller, faster package, Anthropic said in a press release on Wednesday. The new model is being made available to everyone, and will be the default for free users on Claude.ai. Anthropic says Haiku 4.5 is significantly faster than Sonnet 4, but at a third of the cost. When using Claude for Chrome, an extension that gives Chrome users AI capabilities in their browser, Anthropic said Haiku 4.5 is faster and better at agentic tasks. Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. Because Haiku 4.5 is a small model, it can be deployed as a sub-agent for Sonnet 4.5. So, while Sonnet 4.5 plans and organizes complex projects, small Haiku sub-agents can finish other tasks in the background. For coding tasks, Sonnet can handle the high-level thinking while Haiku deals with other tasks like refactors and migrations. For financial analysis, Sonnet can do predictive modeling while Haiku monitors data streams and tracks regulatory changes, market signals and portfolio risks. On the research side of things, Sonnet can deal with comprehensive analysis while Haiku reviews literature, gathers data and synthesizes documents from multiple sources. Haiku's speed also assists on the chatbot side of things, handling requests faster. "Haiku 4.5 is the latest iteration of our smallest model, and it's built for everyone who wants the superior intelligence, the trustworthiness, and the creative partnership of Claude in a lightweight package," Anthropic CEO Mike Krieger said in a statement provided to CNET. Given the high expense to train and deploy AI models, companies have been looking for ways to roll out smaller, more efficient models that are still performant. An AI query consumes significantly more energy than a Google search, but it depends on the size of the AI model. A large model with over 405 billion parameters can eat up 6,706 joules of energy, enough to run a microwave for eight seconds, according to an MIT Technology Review report. A small model, however, one with eight billion parameters, may only eat up 114 joules of energy, which is like running a microwave for one-tenth of a second. A Google search can use 1,080 joules of energy. Letting smaller, more efficient models take on the load of simpler queries or background tasks can significantly save on server costs. ChatGPT-5, for example, can move between models, giving instant responses for lighter questions of leveraging more power for complex queries. Energy-saving measures are necessary as AI companies need to be able to recoup the potential trillions that'll be spent in data center investments.

Claude's latest model is cheaper and faster than Sonnet 4 - and free

Anthropic launched its new Haiku 4.5 model.The small model is faster and more cost-effective. Haiku 4.5 is available for all Claude.ai free plans. While large language models (LLMs) are what we most commonly associate with generative AI products, such as chatbots, small language models (SLMs) have their own perks, including lower costs and higher speeds. Leaning into these advantages, Anthropic is now launching a new small model: Haiku 4.5. Also: I've tested free vs. paid AI coding tools - here's which one I'd actually use Despite its smaller size, Haiku 4.5 demonstrated similar levels of coding performance on the SWE-bench verified to Claude Sonnet 4, which, when launched four months ago, Anthropic claimed was the world's best coding model. The company said Haiku 4.5 can even surpass Claude Sonnet 4 in tasks such as computer usage while being one-third the cost and twice the speed. The advanced capabilities, combined with high speed, make it a particularly good fit for real-time, low-latency tasks like those a chatbot can handle, according to the post. All users will be able to put Haiku 4.5 to the test, as the model is available in Claude apps, including the Claude.ai chatbot. Beyond coding capabilities, the model performed competitively against Claude Sonnet 4.5, the company's flagship LLM that launched at the end of September, on a series of benchmarks, including the MMMU, which tests for visual reasoning; AIME 2025, which tests for high school-level math; and r2-bench, which evaluates for an agentic tool user. On the safety front, Anthropic said that Haiku 4.5 has shown low rates of concerning behaviors and was "substantially more aligned" than its predecessor, Claude Haiku 3.5, and "significantly" more aligned than Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Opus 4.1, making it the company's safest model yet. Its performance across safety evaluations earned it an AI Safety Level 2 standard, which is internal to Anthropic, not determined by a third-party tester or external organization. The company offered more details on the designation in the model's system card. Beyond enjoying a cheaper yet still capable model, developers will also be able to use Haiku 4.5 in combination with the heavier Claude Sonnet 4.5, which Anthropic claimed is still the most powerful coding model available. Also: Even the best AI agents are thwarted by this protocol - what can be done Sonnet 4.5 can be used to break down a problem a develop a multi-step plan, which a "team of multiple Haiku 4.5s" could then complete task by task, Anthropic wrote. Want more stories about AI? Sign up for AI Leaderboard, our weekly newsletter. Claude Haiku 4.5 is available for developers on the API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud's Vertex AI. Anthropic said pricing is now $1/$5 per million input and output tokens.

US tech startup Anthropic unveils cheaper model to widen AI's appeal

Oct 15 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic has overhauled its smallest AI model, Haiku, as companies increasingly opt for AI systems that are nearly as capable as the most advanced tools - but come at a fraction of the cost. Anthropic said on Wednesday that the updated model, called Haiku 4.5, is about one-third the cost of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models, and one-fifteenth the cost of its most advanced offering, Opus. The new Haiku model performs as well or better than Sonnet 4 on a range of tasks, including coding. Traditional companies outside of Silicon Valley are more likely to use AI if they have cheaper, yet still capable models to try, Mike Krieger, the company's chief product officer, said in an interview. It also makes it easier for firms to add more AI to their internal systems that might be used by hundreds or thousands of employees, he added. "Often, there's a lot of scale to that," Krieger said. "Small models really help because they can be a more economical way of deploying into that." The vast majority - about 80% - of the company's revenue comes from companies, an Anthropic spokesperson said, adding that it has more than 300,000 enterprise customers that use Anthropic tools internally, for products or both. Anthropic's annual revenue run rate - a calculation of annual revenue extrapolated from the current sales pace - is almost $7 billion, the spokesperson said. Anthropic also draws revenue from people who pay to use Anthropic's chatbot, Claude. San Francisco-based Anthropic, last valued at $183 billion, was formed in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI employees. Its models go toe-to-toe with those of its more famous counterpart. This is the first time in about a year that Anthropic has updated its smallest model, Krieger said. In the earliest days of the modern AI boom, executives at companies like Anthropic and OpenAI tended to talk up their most powerful and capable AI systems. Such systems can cost $100 million or more to train and need a lot of computing power to respond to customer queries or requests. But many customers balk at the computational costs of using the best models. So in response, AI companies have had to think small. It is possible to use the different models in tandem, Krieger said. Some companies rely on the most advanced models to set strategy or make plans, but outsource the grunt work to smaller models that can search the Web and synthesize information. Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Matthew Lewis Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 4.5, a smaller, cheaper AI model

Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in 2025. Anthropic on Wednesday announced Claude Haiku 4.5, a small artificial intelligence model that's available as a lower-cost offering for all of the company's users. The model is fast and can outperform other larger models that were considered cutting edge just months ago, Anthropic said. Claude Haiku 4.5 is better at using computers than Claude Sonnet 4, for instance, which is a midsized model the company launched in May. It performs similarly to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI's most recent model, GPT-5, at coding, according to SWE-bench Verified, a test set that measures an AI system's software coding abilities. "It punches way above its weight," Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, told CNBC in an interview. Claude Haiku 4.5 serves as the new default model for Anthropic's free users, and it's now the cheapest model available to paid users.

Claude Haiku 4.5 just launched -- and vibe coding will never be the same

Anthropic has just announced Claude Haiku 4.5, a new lightweight AI model that's fast enough to power real-time experiences and smart enough to rival its bigger sibling, Claude Sonnet 4.5. And in a major move, it's available for free to all Claude.ai users starting today. Just two weeks after rolling out Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic's latest launch promises superior intelligence wrapped in a lightweight package that supports chatting, coding and workflows. Small but mighty, Claude Haiku 4.5 outperforms Sonnet 4.5 making Claude for Chrome faster than ever. Here's where it shines: Because Haiku is designed to scale, users can now deploy multiple Haiku 4.5 agents in parallel, assigning sub-tasks like code refactoring or document synthesis while a larger model like Sonnet 4.5 coordinates the overall plan. Anthropic says this multi-agent flow is ideal for complex builds, financial monitoring and even large-scale research. For real-world use cases, that means faster, more responsive chatting, sub-agent execution when coding and compliance tracking. This could also be a game changer for research with parallelized data gathering, literature reviews and synthesis, giving users time back. It also suggests faster in-browser assistance for anyone using Claude for Chrome. Haiku 4.5 is now the default model for all free Claude.ai plans. Users do not need a subscription to use one of the fastest, smartest models available today. With this rollout, Anthropic is betting big on speed, trust and accessibility while still prioritizing safety. This launch also opens the door for a new class of "free agents" or, lightweight AI agents that run at low cost with high performance. According to Anthropic, Haiku 4.5 makes agentic AI at scale economically viable, especially when building tools that rely on fast, intelligent responses in real time. Like all Claude models, Haiku 4.5 is trained with Anthropic's constitutional AI and safety guardrails in place. But unlike the heavier models, it's tuned for speed and responsiveness, giving users a faster, more intelligence model designed for efficiency. Anthropic's mission with Haiku 4.5 underscores their goal to democratize advanced AI while making multi-agent systems available to everyone without a subscription. It's available today, so give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!

Anthropic is giving away its powerful Claude Haiku 4.5 AI for free to take on OpenAI

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5 on Wednesday, a smaller and significantly cheaper artificial intelligence model that matches the coding capabilities of systems that were considered cutting-edge just months ago, marking the latest salvo in an intensifying competition to dominate enterprise AI. The model costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens -- roughly one-third the price of Anthropic's mid-sized Sonnet 4 model released in May, while operating more than twice as fast. In certain tasks, particularly operating computers autonomously, Haiku 4.5 actually surpasses its more expensive predecessor. "Haiku 4.5 is a clear leap in performance and is now largely as smart as Sonnet 4 while being significantly faster and one-third of the cost," an Anthropic spokesperson told VentureBeat, underscoring how rapidly AI capabilities are becoming commoditized as the technology matures. The launch comes just two weeks after Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, which the company bills as the world's best coding model, and two months after introducing Opus 4.1. The breakneck pace of releases reflects mounting pressure from OpenAI, whose $500 billion valuation dwarfs Anthropic's $183 billion, and which has inked a series of multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals while expanding its product lineup. How free access to advanced AI could reshape the enterprise market In an unusual move that could reshape competitive dynamics in the AI market, Anthropic is making Haiku 4.5 the default model for all free users of its Claude.ai platform. The decision effectively democratizes access to what the company characterizes as "near-frontier-level intelligence" -- capabilities that would have been available only in expensive, premium models months ago. "The launch of Claude Haiku 4.5 means that near-frontier-level intelligence is available for free to all users through Claude.ai," the Anthropic spokesperson told VentureBeat. "It also offers significant advantages to our enterprise customers: Sonnet 4.5 can handle frontier planning while Haiku 4.5 powers sub-agents, enabling multi-agent systems that tackle complex refactors, migrations, and large features builds with speed and quality." This multi-agent architecture signals a significant shift in how AI systems are deployed. Rather than relying on a single, monolithic model, enterprises can now orchestrate teams of specialized AI agents: a more sophisticated Sonnet 4.5 model breaking down complex problems and delegating subtasks to multiple Haiku 4.5 agents working in parallel. For software development teams, this could mean Sonnet 4.5 plans a major code refactoring while Haiku 4.5 agents simultaneously execute changes across dozens of files. The approach mirrors how human organizations distribute work, and could prove particularly valuable for enterprises seeking to balance performance with cost efficiency -- a critical consideration as AI deployment scales. Inside Anthropic's path to $7 billion in annual revenue The model launch coincides with revelations that Anthropic's business is experiencing explosive growth. The company's annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, Anthropic told Reuters, up from more than $5 billion reported in August. Internal projections obtained by Reuters suggest the company is targeting between $20 billion and $26 billion in annualized revenue for 2026, representing growth of more than 200% to nearly 300%. The company now serves more than 300,000 business customers, with enterprise products accounting for approximately 80% of revenue. Among Anthropic's most successful offerings is Claude Code, a code-generation tool that has reached nearly $1 billion in annualized revenue since launching earlier this year. Those numbers come as artificial intelligence enters what many in the industry characterize as a critical inflection point. After two years of what Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger recently described as "AI FOMO" -- where companies adopted AI tools without clear success metrics -- enterprises are now demanding measurable returns on investment. "The best products can be grounded in some kind of success metric or evaluation," Krieger said on the "Superhuman AI" podcast. "I've seen that a lot in talking to companies that are deploying AI." For enterprises evaluating AI tools, the calculus increasingly centers on concrete productivity gains. Google CEO Sundar Pichai claimed in June that AI had generated a 10% boost in engineering velocity at his company -- though measuring such improvements across different roles and use cases remains challenging, as Krieger acknowledged. Why AI safety testing matters more than ever for enterprise adoption Anthropic's launch comes amid heightened scrutiny of the company's approach to AI safety and regulation. On Tuesday, David Sacks, the White House's AI "czar" and a venture capitalist, accused Anthropic of "running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering" that is "damaging the startup ecosystem." The attack targeted remarks by Jack Clark, Anthropic's British co-founder and head of policy, who had described being "deeply afraid" of AI's trajectory. Clark told Bloomberg he found Sacks' criticism "perplexing." Anthropic addressed such concerns head-on in its release materials, emphasizing that Haiku 4.5 underwent extensive safety testing. The company classified the model as ASL-2 -- its AI Safety Level 2 standard -- compared to the more restrictive ASL-3 designation for the more powerful Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1 models. "Our teams have red-teamed and tested our agentic capabilities to the limits in order to assess whether it can be used to engage in harmful activity like generating misinformation or promoting fraudulent behavior like scams," the spokesperson told VentureBeat. "In our automated alignment assessment, it showed a statistically significantly lower overall rate of misaligned behaviors than both Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Claude Opus 4.1 -- making it, by this metric, our safest model yet." The company said its safety testing showed Haiku 4.5 poses only limited risks regarding the production of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons. Anthropic has also implemented classifiers designed to detect and filter prompt injection attacks, a common method for attempting to manipulate AI systems into producing harmful content. The emphasis on safety reflects Anthropic's founding mission. The company was established in 2021 by former OpenAI executives, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who left amid concerns about OpenAI's direction following its partnership with Microsoft. Anthropic has positioned itself as taking a more cautious, research-oriented approach to AI development. Benchmark results show Haiku 4.5 competing with larger, more expensive models According to Anthropic's benchmarks, Haiku 4.5 performs competitively with or exceeds several larger models across multiple evaluation criteria. On SWE-bench Verified, a widely used test measuring AI systems' ability to solve real-world software engineering problems, Haiku 4.5 scored 73.3% -- slightly ahead of Sonnet 4's 72.7% and close to GPT-5 Codex's 74.5%. The model demonstrated particular strength in computer use tasks, achieving 50.7% on the OSWorld benchmark compared to Sonnet 4's 42.2%. This capability allows the AI to interact directly with computer interfaces -- clicking buttons, filling forms, navigating applications -- which could prove transformative for automating routine digital tasks. In coding-specific benchmarks like Terminal-Bench, which tests AI agents' ability to complete complex software tasks using command-line tools, Haiku 4.5 scored 41.0%, trailing only Sonnet 4.5's 50.0% among Claude models. The model maintains a 200,000-token context window for standard users, with developers accessing the Claude Developer Platform able to use a 1-million-token context window. That expanded capacity means the model can process extremely large codebases or documents in a single request -- roughly equivalent to a 1,500-page book. What three major AI model releases in two months says about the competition When asked about the rapid succession of model releases, the Anthropic spokesperson emphasized the company's focus on execution rather than competitive positioning. "We're focused on shipping the best possible products for our customers -- and our shipping velocity speaks for itself," the spokesperson said. "What was state-of-the-art just five months ago is now faster, cheaper, and more accessible." That velocity stands in contrast to the company's earlier, more measured release schedule. Anthropic appeared to have paused development of its Haiku line after releasing version 3.5 at the end of last year, leading some observers to speculate the company had deprioritized smaller models. That rapid price-performance improvement validates a core promise of artificial intelligence: that capabilities will become dramatically cheaper over time as the technology matures and companies optimize their models. For enterprises, it suggests that today's budget constraints around AI deployment may ease considerably in coming years. From customer service to code: Real-world applications for faster, cheaper AI The practical applications of Haiku 4.5 span a wide range of enterprise functions, from customer service to financial analysis to software development. The model's combination of speed and intelligence makes it particularly suited for real-time, low-latency tasks like chatbot conversations and customer support interactions, where delays of even a few seconds can degrade user experience. In financial services, the multi-agent architecture enabled by pairing Sonnet 4.5 with Haiku 4.5 could transform how firms monitor markets and manage risk. Anthropic envisions Haiku 4.5 monitoring thousands of data streams simultaneously -- tracking regulatory changes, market signals and portfolio risks -- while Sonnet 4.5 handles complex predictive modeling and strategic analysis. For research organizations, the division of labor could compress timelines dramatically. Sonnet 4.5 might orchestrate a comprehensive analysis while multiple Haiku 4.5 agents parallelize literature reviews, data gathering and document synthesis across dozens of sources, potentially "compressing weeks of research into hours," according to Anthropic's use case descriptions. Several companies have already integrated Haiku 4.5 and reported positive results. Guy Gur-Ari, co-founder of coding startup Augment, said the model "hit a sweet spot we didn't think was possible: near-frontier coding quality with blazing speed and cost efficiency." In Augment's internal testing, Haiku 4.5 achieved 90% of Sonnet 4.5's performance while matching much larger models. Jeff Wang, CEO of Windsurf, another coding-focused startup, said Haiku 4.5 "is blurring the lines" on traditional trade-offs between speed, cost and quality. "It's a fast frontier model that keeps costs efficient and signals where this class of models is headed." Jon Noronha, co-founder of presentation software company Gamma, reported that Haiku 4.5 "outperformed our current models on instruction-following for slide text generation, achieving 65% accuracy versus 44% from our premium tier model -- that's a game-changer for our unit economics." The price of progress: What plummeting AI costs mean for enterprise strategy For enterprises evaluating AI strategies, Haiku 4.5 presents both opportunity and challenge. The opportunity lies in accessing sophisticated AI capabilities at dramatically lower costs, potentially making viable entire categories of applications that were previously too expensive to deploy at scale. The challenge is keeping pace with a technology landscape that is evolving faster than most organizations can absorb. As Krieger noted in his recent podcast appearance, companies are moving beyond "AI FOMO" to demand concrete metrics and demonstrated value. But establishing those metrics and evaluation frameworks takes time -- time that may be in short supply as competitors race ahead. The shift from single-model deployments to multi-agent architectures also requires new ways of thinking about AI systems. Rather than viewing AI as a monolithic assistant, enterprises must learn to orchestrate multiple specialized agents, each optimized for particular tasks -- more akin to managing a team than operating a tool. The fundamental economics of AI are shifting with remarkable speed. Five months ago, Sonnet 4's capabilities commanded premium pricing and represented the cutting edge. Today, Haiku 4.5 delivers similar performance at a third of the cost. If that trajectory continues -- and both Anthropic's release schedule and competitive pressure from OpenAI and Google suggest it will -- the AI capabilities that seem remarkable today may be routine and inexpensive within a year. For Anthropic, the challenge will be translating technical achievements into sustainable business growth while maintaining the safety-focused approach that differentiates it from competitors. The company's projected revenue growth to as much as $26 billion by 2026 suggests strong market traction, but achieving those targets will require continued innovation and successful execution across an increasingly complex product portfolio. Whether enterprises will choose Claude over increasingly capable alternatives from OpenAI, Google and a growing field of competitors remains an open question. But Anthropic is making a clear bet: that the future of AI belongs not to whoever builds the single most powerful model, but to whoever can deliver the right intelligence, at the right speed, at the right price -- and make it accessible to everyone. In an industry where the promise of artificial intelligence has long outpaced reality, Anthropic is betting that delivering on that promise, faster and cheaper than anyone expected, will be enough to win. And with pricing dropping by two-thirds in just five months while performance holds steady, that promise is starting to look like reality.

Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 4.5: Faster, cheaper, and smarter than ever

Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 4.5 on Wednesday, the latest version of its compact AI model designed for speed, affordability, and safety. The company says Haiku 4.5 delivers near-frontier-level performance -- matching the coding capabilities of Claude Sonnet 4 at one-third the cost and twice the speed. It's now available across Anthropic's apps, Claude Code, and through Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI. Pricing is set at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. Haiku 4.5 is also Anthropic's safest model yet, according to the company's internal evaluations. It scored lower on misalignment behaviors than even the flagship Claude Sonnet 4.5 and carries an AI Safety Level 2 classification -- a less restrictive rating than the ASL-3 label given to Anthropic's more advanced models. The lightweight model is aimed at developers and companies building real-time AI applications like chat assistants, coding copilots, and customer service tools. But the timing of the launch is notable. Just this week, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic has become a target for criticism from the Trump administration's AI czar, David Sacks, who accused the company of "regulatory capture" and "fear-mongering" over its support for California's new AI transparency law. Cofounder Jack Clark pushed back, saying the company is aligned with the White House on most issues but continues to advocate for responsible federal oversight. Taken together, the release of Haiku 4.5 could be seen as a balancing act. One that's trying to prove that AI safety and progress don't have to be at odds -- even as the political climate around those principles grows more hostile.

Anthropic debuts entry-level Claude Haiku 4.5 hybrid reasoning model - SiliconANGLE

The company will charge users of the model $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. Anthropic's flagship LLM, Claude Sonnet 4.5, costs three times as much. Haiku 4.5 is a hybrid reasoning model, which means that it can adjust the amount of computing power it uses to process requests. By default, the algorithm generates responses through a workflow that requires limited hardware resources. Users can enable an "extended thinking" mode to have Haiku 4.5 produce more complex responses that take longer to generate. Anthropic trained the LLM on public webpages, content from third-party data providers and internal records. The latter files included information from Claude customers who gave the company permission to use their data for AI training. Anthropic removed duplicate entries from the dataset to increase training efficiency. According to the company, Haiku 4.5 can ingest multimodal prompts containing up to 200,000 tokens' worth of information. That enables it to process large files such as lengthy business documents. The model outputs up to 64,000 tokens per response. Anthropic evaluated Haiku 4.5's capabilities using eight popular benchmarks. The LLM trailed Anthropic's flagship Sonnet 4.5 model by less than 10% across most of the tests. It managed to outperform the company's previous flagship LLM, Sonnet 4, across three benchmarks that contained coding tasks and high school math problems. Improved cost-efficiency is not Haiku 4.5's only selling point. Anthropic describes it as the the safest LLM developed by its engineers to date. Additionally, the algorithm is more than twice as fast as Sonnet 4, which makes it useful for latency-sensitive applications such as customer support chatbots. Haiku 4.5 also lends itself to AI agent projects. According to Anthropic, an agent based on its flagship Sonnet 4.5 model could reduce inference costs by relegating simple tasks to Haiku 4.5 sub-agents. Such workflows can be used to automate multi-step coding and market research tasks. Haiku 4.5 is available through application programming interfaces and Anthropic's Claude chatbot. It's also included in Claude Code, which has emerged as a major growth driver for the company since its launch in May. Reuters today cited sources as saying that the programming assistant is approaching $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.

Anthropic Releases Claude 4.5 Haiku | AIM

Available for all users today, the company said that it offers similar levels of coding performance to the Claude Sonnet 4, at just one-third the cost. On the SWE-bench Verified benchmark, which evaluates AI models on real-world software engineering tasks, Claude Haiku 4.5 scored 73.3%. Its performance is slightly better than Sonnet 4 (72.7%) and outperforms Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (67.2%). The company also shared additional benchmarks that evaluate Claude 4.5 Haiku and the competition on autonomous tasks, math, and graduate-level science and mathematics questions. "Users who rely on AI for real-time, low-latency tasks like chat assistants, customer service agents, or pair programming will appreciate Haiku 4.5's combination of high intelligence and remarkable speed," said Anthropic. While the company recently launched its flagship model, the Sonnet 4.5, it states that the Haiku 4.5 offers users a new option for "near-frontier performance with much greater cost-efficiency." Anthropic states that the Sonnet 4.5 model can break complex programs into multi-step tasks, leveraging several Claude 4.5 Haiku instances working concurrently to handle subtasks. The Haiku 4.5 model's API costs $1 and $5 per million input and output tokens, respectively. Meanwhile, the Sonnet 4.5 costs $3 and $6 per million input and output tokens, respectively. On the other hand, Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash, which is focused on speed and cost efficiency, is priced at $0.3 and $2.5 per million input and output tokens, respectively. "Claude Haiku 4.5 delivers intelligence without sacrificing speed," said Ben Lafferty, a staff engineer at Shopify, in a testimonial to Anthropic. In another testimonial, Andrew Filev, CEO of Zencoder, said Haiku 4.5 runs four to five times faster than the Sonnet 4.5 model. Co-founded and led by former OpenAI executive Dario Amodei, Anthropic's Claude family of models, along with products like Claude Code, has gained significant popularity within the software development community for its coding capabilities.

Anthropic's New Claude Release Could Be the Faster, Cheaper AI Tool Small Companies Need

Anthropic has announced Claude Haiku 4.5, the latest in its line of small AI models that the company has optimized for speed and cost-effectiveness. The AI firm says the new model matches or exceeds the coding and agentic performance of its mid-sized model Claude Sonnet 4 (released in May), but at a third of the price and more than twice the speed. In a blog post, Anthropic said that Haiku 4.5 is a prime example of the company's philosophy that top-tier model capabilities will become cheaper and faster as the technology frontier advances. While frontier AI models like OpenAI's GPT-5 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.1 will likely stay expensive, cheaper alternatives will continue to become more useful. According to Anthropic, the combination of Haiku 4.5's capability and cost make it particularly suited to acquiring customers. For example, Anthropic said that Haiku 4.5 can make it economically viable for businesses to integrate agentic experiences (an AI agent is a computer program that acts independently to achieve a goal) for free-tier customers. Specifically, Anthropic says, Haiku 4.5 is an ideal model for powering fast-response chatbots and customer service agents. The new model's low-cost combination of intelligence and speed means that it can complete workflows much faster than its larger siblings, enabling it to resolve tickets and customer issues faster. In some uses, including coding, financial analysis, and research, Anthropic anticipates that Haiku 4.5 will work together with larger models like Claude Sonnet 4.5, which was released two weeks ago. In these scenarios, the larger model develops a plan and then directs multiple instances of the smaller model to carry out individual aspects of the plan. For example, Anthropic says that in coding, Claude Sonnet 4.5 could handle the planning phase of software development, and then engage multiple Haiku 4.5-powered "sub-agents" to work in tandem on multiple tasks at once. Or, in finance, Haiku 4.5 could monitor "thousands of data streams," such as regulatory changes and market signals, to complement Sonnet 4.5's predictive financial modeling. In research, Haiku 4.5 could gather and review data from many sources and then provide its insights to Sonnet 4.5 for deeper analysis. Jon Noronha, founder and head of product at Gamma, an AI-powered platform for designing slideshow presentations and websites, said that Haiku 4.5 achieved 65 percent accuracy at generating text for slides, versus their previous top model's 44 percent. "That's a game-changer for our unit economics," Noronha said in a statement. In addition to external business uses, Haiku 4.5 will now be the default model for all free plans on Claude.ai, the company's consumer-facing online platform, and the Claude mobile app. Haiku 4.5 will also power Claude for Chrome, a Google Chrome extension that allows Claude to take control of a web browser. Previously, Claude for Chrome was powered by Claude Sonnet 4.5, a larger model released two weeks ago, but by switching to the smaller Haiku, the extension can run significantly faster. For developers at small and medium-sized businesses who don't have near-unlimited AI budgets, Haiku 4.5 could open up a variety of uses that were previously too ambitious and expensive. It's worth noting that Claude Haiku 4.5 is slightly more expensive than its predecessor. Through Anthropic's API, the model will cost $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens. (Tokens are the individual units of text that are processed by AI models.) This is a slight increase over Claude Haiku 3.5, which Anthropic released in October 2024 at a price of $0.80 per million input tokens and $4 per million output tokens. Claude has exploded in popularity in 2025 due to its coding prowess. The AI models have been instrumental in the growth of several tech startups offering AI-assisted coding, such as Replit, Base44, and Cursor.