Claude Haiku 4.5 is a smaller, faster, and more efficient model from Anthropic that outperforms several leading models in agent-related tasks while offering significant speed improvements and cost-effectiveness despite a price increase. Positioned as a practical “grunt” model for high-throughput tasks, it complements larger models for complex reasoning and shows strong potential as a backbone for scalable AI agents and real-time applications.
Anthropic has recently released Claude Haiku 4.5, a new iteration of their smaller, faster model line. Although the pricing has increased—now costing $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, up from previous versions—this change might be justified by the model’s improved performance and speed. Despite the higher cost compared to earlier Haiku models, Claude Haiku 4.5 is positioned as a highly efficient and capable model, potentially deserving its own distinct name. Anthropic maintains that Haiku will remain their smallest and fastest model, setting the stage for anticipation around the upcoming Opus 4.5, which is expected to be a powerful model.
The release highlights that Claude Haiku 4.5 can outperform the recently launched Claude Sonnet 4 on several benchmarks, including agent-related tasks and computer use, although it may lag slightly behind on complex reasoning tasks. Anthropic suggests using larger models like Sonnet 4.5 or Opus 4.5 for heavy reasoning, while Haiku 4.5 serves as a “grunt” model to efficiently handle a large volume of tasks quickly. This approach leverages Haiku 4.5’s speed and decent intelligence to complement more powerful models, making it a practical choice for building agents and handling function calling.
Benchmark comparisons reveal that Claude Haiku 4.5 surpasses other leading models such as GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro in various tasks, including coding and general agentic functions, and does so at roughly twice the speed of Sonnet 4. This demonstrates Anthropic’s dual focus on improving both model intelligence and operational speed, which is increasingly important for real-time applications like agent frameworks. Despite the price increase, Haiku 4.5 remains significantly cheaper than Sonnet 4.5, making it a cost-effective option for many use cases.
In practical tests run on Google Cloud Platform, Claude Haiku 4.5 showed impressive speed, with a time to first token of under half a second and a total response time of about 3.6 seconds for simple prompts. This is notably faster than both Sonnet 4 and Sonnet 4.5, which had longer initial response times. Compared to earlier Haiku versions, Haiku 4.5 offers a substantial speed improvement over Haiku 3.5, while maintaining a good balance of intelligence and efficiency. These performance gains make it ideal for tasks requiring quick turnaround and high throughput.
Overall, Claude Haiku 4.5 emerges as a versatile and efficient model that can serve as the backbone for many agentic and structured output tasks. Its combination of speed, improved intelligence, and relatively affordable pricing positions it as a strong contender for developers looking to build scalable AI agents. The video creator plans to explore Haiku 4.5 further in upcoming videos, particularly in the context of agentic frameworks, signaling that this model could become a default choice for many AI applications moving forward.