Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic released 2025-10-15 proprietary
Gemini 3.7 Flash is both better and cheaper.
It scores +26.1 higher and costs 63% less ($0.750/M against $2.00/M) on this workload — and it does everything this model does.
DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 is cheaper still (95% less) but drops no image, file input.
The same model via batch is 50% cheaper ($1.00/M) — same weights, different latency.
Our take
editorial — not a measurementThe cheap Anthropic tier at $1/$5, and the odd one out in the current lineup — it still uses extended thinking rather than adaptive thinking, and it is capped at a 200k context and 64k output while every 4.6-and-later model gets 1M. That makes it a classification and routing model, not a small general assistant. At $1 input it is roughly 20x the price of the cheapest capable open-weight models, so it only makes sense when you specifically want Anthropic's safety behaviour and refusal profile at low cost.
Strengths
- $1/$5 with Anthropic's alignment and tool-use behaviour
- Fastest Claude latency profile
- Full caching and 50% batch discount support
Weaknesses
- 200k context and 64k output — a fifth of the current generation
- Extended thinking rather than adaptive thinking
- Far more expensive than equivalent open-weight small models
- Older knowledge cutoff (training data to Jul 2025)
Reach for it when
- Classification and extraction
- Router / triage models in front of a larger model
- High-volume support ticket handling
Avoid it if
- You need long context
- Price per token is the deciding factor
Every price dimension
| Input | $1.00/M |
|---|---|
| Output | $5.00/M |
| Cached input | $0.100/M |
| Cache write | $1.25/M |
| Cache write 1h | $2.00/M |
| Web search | $0.01/call |
| Batch discount | 50% |
Independent scores
| Intelligence | 29.9 |
|---|---|
| Coding | 43.9 |
| Agentic | 16.5 |
Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.
Capability
| Context window | 200K |
|---|---|
| Max output | 64K |
| Input modes | text, image, file |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | optional |
| Open weights | no |
Provenance
| Price source | openrouter.ai |
|---|---|
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |
Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s fastest and most efficient model, delivering near-frontier intelligence at a fraction of the cost and latency of larger Claude models. Matching Claude Sonnet 4’s performance...