Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 4.5, A Faster, Cheaper AI Model for Cost-Sensitive Use Cases

Anthropic has unveiled Claude Haiku 4.5, a new large language model (LLM) optimised for cost-efficiency and real-time performance, marking the latest addition to its Claude 4.5 family.

The company recently announced plans to expand in India, and co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with members of the Indian tech community in Bangalore.

Priced at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, Haiku 4.5 is nearly three times cheaper than Anthropic’s flagship Claude Sonnet 4.5 model. It is designed to help businesses and developers run AI at scale without compromising on accuracy or safety.

"Claude Haiku 4.5 even surpasses Claude Sonnet 4 at certain tasks, like using computers. These advances make applications like Claude for Chrome faster and more useful than ever before," Anthropic said.

Haiku 4.5 features hybrid reasoning, allowing it to dynamically adjust computing power based on task complexity. In its standard mode, it delivers quick, lightweight responses, while an optional “extended thinking” mode enables deeper, more analytical reasoning.

Trained on a mix of public data, licensed third-party sources, and opt-in customer data, Anthropic says the model eliminates duplicates for greater training efficiency.

It supports multimodal prompts of up to 200,000 tokens and can output up to 64,000 tokens per response, enabling it to handle extensive documents and enterprise workloads.

Benchmark tests show Haiku 4.5 performs within 10% of Sonnet 4.5’s accuracy while outperforming the previous-generation Sonnet 4 on coding and math tasks. Anthropic also claims Haiku 4.5 is its safest and fastest model to date, running more than twice as fast as Sonnet 4 — a key advantage for customer service bots, real-time applications, and AI agents.

The company envisions Haiku 4.5 as a complementary model for AI agent ecosystems, where flagship models delegate simpler tasks to cost-efficient “sub-agents.”

Haiku 4.5 is available through Anthropic’s API, the Claude chatbot, and Claude Code, the firm’s AI programming assistant that’s nearing $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.