- Anthropic’s new Claude Haiku 4.5 model promises twice the speed but almost the same power as the larger Sonnet model.
- It is now the default model for all free users of Claude.
- Haiku 4.5 can act as a sub-agent for larger models, surpassing previous small models.
Anthropic has dropped Claude Haiku 4.5, a new sleek and fast AI model aptly named after the famous short poetic form. The company claims that the Claude Haiku 4.5 is almost as powerful as its much larger sibling, the Claude Sonnet 4, but much cheaper and capable of running at twice the speed.
Haiku 4.5 is built for scenarios where latency matters, whether in conversation, in an app, or as an agent performing a task online. The model is now the default for Claude free-tier users. Anthropic is pitching Haiku 4.5 as a complete strategic revamp of lightweight AI models.
The fact that it already beats previous-generation models at many tasks while taking far less time simply underscores a growing shift in how AI performance is about more than sheer brute force now.
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It helps that Haiku 4.5 orchestrates its activities with other models. Anthropic describes it as a sub-agent in a team of models that carries out small, targeted actions under the direction of the larger but slower models such as Sonnet 4.5. Sonnet plans and coordinates while a bunch of Haiku 4.5 agents tackle tasks at the same time. Think a digital Ocean’s 11 running their specialties for the organizer in the base.
Anthropic has also ensured that Haiku 4.5 plays well with the rest of its tool ecosystem. It drives Claude to Chrome extensions and plugs into Claude Pro accounts along with Sonnet and Opus, depending on the task type.
Haiku 4.5 also offers improved security and tone setting. In particular, it has a much lower sycophancy score than previous iterations of Haiku or anthropic flagship models like Opus 4.1. So the model is much less likely to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. Given the mounting evidence that overly flattering AI can lead to real psychological problems, a more objective AI model is a doubly good choice.
Haiku for you
The implications for regular Claude users and AI developers are obvious. if you’ve avoided Claude’s more powerful models due to wait time or cost. Haiku 4.5 now gives you a faster and cheaper entry point without compromising much on intelligence. And Claude’s free users now have access to a model as good as one they would have had to pay for until very recently.
A faster chatbot that can code, write, and research on command with little delay is suddenly within reach of anyone using Claude in a browser, in a plugin, or embedded in a third-party app. The kinds of tools people build on top of models like Haiku 4.5 are likely to be smarter, more interactive, and cheaper to run.
For Anthropic, it’s also a smart bet that what people want is an AI that can do what they want quickly, not one that can do anything at all except slower and more expensive. The biggest models can do very impressive things, but the Claude Haiku 4.5’s speed and polish might be the winning combination.
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