Curiosity · AI Model

Claude 3.5 Haiku

Claude 3.5 Haiku is Anthropic's November 2024 small-model release. It carries the Claude 3.5 family's training improvements down to the Haiku size class, giving developers Claude-3-Opus-class quality on many benchmarks at a tiny fraction of the cost and latency.

Model specs

Vendor
Anthropic
Family
Claude 3.5
Released
2024-11
Context window
200,000 tokens
Modalities
text, vision, code
Input price
$0.8/M tok
Output price
$4/M tok
Pricing as of
2026-04-20

Strengths

  • Matches or beats Claude 3 Opus on several tasks at 1/40th the cost
  • Strong tool use and structured output for a small model
  • Low latency — well-suited to interactive product UX
  • Same 200K context as the rest of the Claude 3.5 family

Limitations

  • No extended thinking — use 3.7+ Sonnet if you need reasoning
  • Text-first; vision support was added later in the release cycle
  • Superseded by Claude Haiku 4.5 on every dimension in 2025

Use cases

  • Real-time chat and interactive assistants
  • Classification and extraction at scale
  • Low-cost sub-agents in Sonnet/Opus orchestration
  • Mobile and edge-backed SaaS features

Benchmarks

BenchmarkScoreAs of
SWE-bench Verified≈40%2024-11
HumanEval≈88%2024-11
MMLU≈78%2024-11

Frequently asked questions

What is Claude 3.5 Haiku?

Claude 3.5 Haiku is the small, fast tier of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 family, released November 2024. It brought Claude-3.5 training gains to the Haiku size, matching or beating Claude 3 Opus on several benchmarks at a fraction of the cost.

How does Claude 3.5 Haiku compare to Claude Haiku 4.5?

Claude Haiku 4.5 (October 2025) is a clear upgrade across coding, vision, and tool use. Claude 3.5 Haiku is still offered for API callers with pipelines tuned to it, but new builds should use Haiku 4.5.

How much does Claude 3.5 Haiku cost?

As of April 2026, Claude 3.5 Haiku is priced at roughly USD 0.80 per million input tokens and USD 4 per million output tokens — slightly below Haiku 4.5 but with older-generation quality.

Does Claude 3.5 Haiku support tool use and vision?

Yes. Claude 3.5 Haiku supports Anthropic's tool-use API and vision input. For the best small-model quality, though, Claude Haiku 4.5 is now recommended.

Sources

  1. Anthropic — Claude 3.5 Haiku — accessed 2026-04-20
  2. Anthropic — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-20