Claude Haiku 4.5 is better, cheaper than Sonnet: Here’s how

Anthropic’s latest small model, Claude Haiku 4.5, has arrived and it’s rewriting expectations for what a “lightweight” AI can do. Released on October 15, 2025, Haiku 4.5 is designed to deliver near-frontier performance at a fraction of the cost, marking a major leap for developers and businesses that need speed, safety, and affordability in one package.

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At its core, Haiku 4.5 aims to bridge the gap between compact efficiency and advanced capability. Anthropic says the model performs on par with, and in some areas even surpasses, its larger sibling Claude Sonnet 4.0, all while running at over twice the speed and costing nearly one-third as much. That’s a compelling tradeoff for real-world deployments where milliseconds and dollars matter.

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Fast, capable, and built for production

Anthropic positions Haiku 4.5 as the go-to model for low-latency, high-frequency tasks such as coding assistance, customer service chatbots, and AI agents that need to respond instantly. Developers can now integrate the model via the Claude API using the new claude-haiku-4-5 identifier, or access it through Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud Vertex AI, ensuring seamless migration from previous versions like Haiku 3.5 or Sonnet 4.

In early internal benchmarks, Haiku 4.5 achieved near-Sonnet-level results in code generation, reasoning, and “using-computer” tasks,  an Anthropic term referring to scenarios where AI interacts with tools or structured data. Remarkably, the company notes that Haiku 4.5 even outperformed Sonnet 4.0 in several of these use cases, underscoring how much small models have caught up to their bigger peers.

Safer and smarter by design

While performance headlines often grab attention, Anthropic is equally emphasizing safety and alignment. Haiku 4.5 was developed under its “Constitutional AI” framework, with alignment tests showing fewer misaligned or unsafe responses compared to Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1.

That safety profile has earned Haiku 4.5 a less restrictive AI Safety Level 2 (ASL-2) designation – unlike higher-risk, frontier models that fall under ASL-3. In practical terms, this means the model is cleared for wider commercial use, especially in domains like education, enterprise tools, and customer interaction where reliability and guardrails are non-negotiable.

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A hybrid future of teamwork between models

Anthropic also hints at a multi-model strategy for developers. Imagine Sonnet 4.5 acting as a “planner” that breaks down complex problems into subtasks, and a fleet of Haiku 4.5 models executing them in parallel, an efficient orchestration approach that combines reasoning depth with real-time responsiveness.

For teams experimenting with AI orchestration and agentic workflows, this hybrid approach could unlock new levels of scalability, balancing cost efficiency with state-of-the-art performance.

Affordable power

With pricing set at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, Haiku 4.5 undercuts many models in its class. That makes it an attractive option for startups, coders, and enterprises building at scale.

In a market where small models are quickly becoming the workhorses behind AI-driven applications, Claude Haiku 4.5 stands out as a milestone release, proof that smaller doesn’t have to mean weaker. It’s cheaper, faster, and smart enough to handle serious work, all while staying safe for the real world.

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Vyom Ramani

A journalist with a soft spot for tech, games, and things that go beep. While waiting for a delayed metro or rebooting his brain, you’ll find him solving Rubik’s Cubes, bingeing F1, or hunting for the next great snack. View Full Profile