Anthropic just dropped Claude Haiku 4.5, and the numbers are impressive: Sonnet 4-level performance at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed. The company's smallest model upgrade is positioning itself as the go-to choice for production AI deployments where latency and server costs matter most.
Anthropic just reshaped the AI model economics game. The company's Claude Haiku 4.5 launch today delivers what CEO Dario Amodei's team calls "Sonnet 4 performance at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed," according to company benchmarks released Wednesday.
The performance claims aren't just marketing speak. Anthropic's internal testing shows Haiku 4.5 scoring 73% on SWE-Bench verified and 41% on the command-line-focused Terminal-Bench - metrics that put it shoulder-to-shoulder with OpenAI's GPT-5 and Google's Gemini 2.5. That's a significant leap for what Anthropic positions as its "lightweight" model tier.
"It's opening up entirely new categories of what's possible with AI in production environments," Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger told press. "With Sonnet handling complex planning while Haiku-powered sub-agents execute at speed, we're giving people a complete agent toolbox where each model has the right combination of intelligence, speed, and cost for different parts of the job."
The timing couldn't be better for developers wrestling with AI infrastructure costs. While OpenAI and Google have been in an arms race for the most capable models, Anthropic is betting on the practical deployment gap - where companies need reliable AI that won't break their budgets or slow their applications to a crawl.
Haiku 4.5's immediate availability across all free Anthropic plans signals a direct play for the developer ecosystem. Companies building AI features into existing products can now access near-flagship performance without the server load penalties that have made premium models cost-prohibitive for many use cases.
The software development sector is already taking notice. "It's unlocking an entirely new set of use cases," Zencoder CEO Andrew Filev said in Anthropic's announcement materials. The Claude Code integration means developers can expect faster code suggestions and debugging assistance without the latency issues that have plagued heavier models.
This launch caps a remarkable sprint for . The company released and Opus 4.1 two months before that, both earning state-of-the-art recognition. The previous Haiku version launched exactly one year ago, making this upgrade cycle particularly aggressive.