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.
Ben Sherry
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