- Anthropic’s new Claude Haiku 4.5 model promises twice the speed but almost the same power as the larger Sonnet model.
- This is now the default model for all free Claude users.
- Haiku 4.5 can act as a subagent for larger models and outperforms previous small models.
Anthropic has dropped Claude Haiku 4.5, a new slim and fast AI model, appropriately named for its famous brief poetic form. The company says Claude Haiku 4.5 is almost as powerful as its much larger sibling, Claude Sonnet 4, but much cheaper and capable of running at twice the speed.
Haiku 4.5 is designed for scenarios where latency is important, whether in a conversation, in an application, or as an agent performing an online task. The template is now the default template for Claude free tier users. Anthropic presents Haiku 4.5 as a complete strategic overhaul of lightweight AI models.
The fact that it already beats previous generation models in many tasks while taking much less time simply highlights a growing shift in how AI performance is no longer limited to simple brute force.
Look on it
It helps that Haiku 4.5 orchestrates its activities with other models. Anthropic describes it as a sub-agent in a team of models, performing small, focused actions under the direction of larger but slower models like Sonnet 4.5. Sonnet plans and coordinates, while a group of Haiku 4.5 agents handle tasks at the same time. Think of a digital Ocean’s 11 managing its specialties for the grassroots organizer.
Anthropic has also ensured that Haiku 4.5 works well with the rest of its tools ecosystem. It powers Claude extensions for Chrome and integrates into Claude Pro accounts alongside Sonnet and Opus, depending on the type of task.
Haiku 4.5 also offers improved security and tone adjustment. In particular, it has a much lower sycophancy score than previous iterations of Haiku or flagship Anthropic models like Opus 4.1. So the model is much less likely to tell you what it thinks you want to hear. Given the growing evidence that overly flattering AI can lead to real psychological problems, a more objective AI model is doubly a good choice.
Haiku for you
The implications for regular Claude users and AI developers are obvious. if you’re avoiding Claude’s more powerful models due to latency or cost. Haiku 4.5 now gives you a faster and cheaper entry point without compromising too much on intelligence. And free Claude users now have access to a model as powerful as the one for which they would have had to pay until very recently.
A faster chatbot, capable of coding, writing, and searching on command with little lag, is suddenly within reach of anyone using Claude on a browser, in a plugin, or embedded in a third-party app. The kinds of tools people are building on top of templates like Haiku 4.5 are likely to be faster, more interactive, and cheaper to use.
For Anthropic, it’s also a smart attempt that what people want is an AI that can do what they want quickly, not an AI that can do anything but slower and more expensive. The bigger models can do some very impressive things, but the speed and polish of Claude Haiku 4.5 could be the winning combination.
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