Claude Haiku 4.5 promises big brains on a budget

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Anthropic has dropped Claude Haiku 4.5, the newest version of its smallest and speediest AI model. 

Think of it as the scrappy little sibling to the mighty Sonnet 4.5, but with a caffeine boost and a clearance-sale price tag. 

According to Anthropic, Haiku 4.5 delivers performance roughly on par with Sonnet 4 (and even GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 in some tests) while costing just one-third as much and running more than twice as fast. 

That’s the AI equivalent of getting a Tesla’s performance in a Prius body.

The company’s internal benchmarks show Haiku 4.5 scoring 73% on SWE-Bench Verified (a coding benchmark) and 41% on Terminal-Bench, which tests command-line skills. 

Those numbers sit comfortably beside the company’s mid-tier Sonnet 4 and rival models from OpenAI and Google. 

It’s not the smartest kid in class, but it’s definitely the one turning in its homework first.

Anthropic is rolling out Haiku 4.5 immediately across all free plans, a move that seems tailor-made for developers and AI platforms that want capable assistants without melting their servers. 

Because it’s so lightweight, Haiku can be spun up in clusters or paired with heavier models like Sonnet to create multitiered AI “agent teams.” 

Picture Sonnet as the mastermind planning the heist, and Haiku as the quick-thinking sidekick sprinting through laser grids.

Anthropic’s CPO, Mike Krieger, framed it as a new era for AI deployment. 

“It’s opening up entirely new categories of what’s possible with AI in production environments,” he said, calling Haiku part of a “complete agent toolbox” that balances intelligence, speed, and cost.

The most immediate beneficiaries? Developers. With latency-sensitive tools like Claude Code already relying on fast model responses, Haiku 4.5 could shave precious seconds off every query. 

Zencoder CEO Andrew Filev even called it a “new set of use cases waiting to be unlocked.”

Haiku 4.5’s launch caps a rapid-fire season for Anthropic, following Sonnet 4.5 just two weeks ago and Opus 4.1 a mere two months prior. 

The last Haiku dropped in October 2024, but with this new version, it’s clear Anthropic’s poetry of speed and smarts is only getting sharper.