Curiosity · AI Model

Claude Haiku 4.5

Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic's small, fast model in the Claude 4 family, released October 2025. It hits Sonnet-4-class scores on many everyday benchmarks while running roughly twice as fast and at one-third the cost — making it the default for interactive UX, sub-agent delegation, and cost-sensitive production workloads.

Model specs

Vendor
Anthropic
Family
Claude 4
Released
2025-10
Context window
200,000 tokens
Modalities
text, vision, code
Input price
$1/M tok
Output price
$5/M tok
Pricing as of
2026-04-20

Strengths

  • Excellent speed — well under a second for typical short prompts
  • Surprisingly strong coding and vision at this price tier
  • Supports native tool use and structured outputs like bigger siblings
  • 200K context window covers most real documents

Limitations

  • Trails Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7 on hard reasoning and long-horizon agent tasks
  • Not recommended as the outermost orchestrator in complex agent graphs
  • Benchmarks are close to Sonnet 4 but drop noticeably on frontier tasks

Use cases

  • Real-time chat and low-latency interactive apps
  • Sub-agents inside Opus/Sonnet orchestration
  • High-volume content moderation and extraction
  • Edge-of-budget coding copilots

Benchmarks

BenchmarkScoreAs of
SWE-bench Verified≈60%2025-10
MMLU-Pro≈72%2025-10
Vision MMMU≈64%2025-10

Frequently asked questions

What is Claude Haiku 4.5?

Claude Haiku 4.5 is the small, fast tier of Anthropic's Claude 4 family, released October 2025. It offers Sonnet-4-class quality on many tasks at roughly one-third the cost, making it ideal for real-time UX and high-volume pipelines.

When should I pick Haiku 4.5 over Sonnet 4.6?

Pick Haiku 4.5 for latency-sensitive UI, sub-agent delegation, and high-volume tasks like classification or extraction. Use Sonnet 4.6 for long-horizon coding agents, research, and cases where quality matters most.

How much does Claude Haiku 4.5 cost?

As of April 2026, Haiku 4.5 is priced at roughly USD 1 per million input tokens and USD 5 per million output tokens on the Anthropic API — about 3x cheaper than Sonnet 4.6.

Does Claude Haiku 4.5 support tool use and vision?

Yes. Haiku 4.5 supports the full Claude tool-use API, vision input, and MCP servers. It is missing only the 1M-token context window that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.7 offer.

Sources

  1. Anthropic — Claude Haiku 4.5 — accessed 2026-04-20
  2. Anthropic — Pricing — accessed 2026-04-20