San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic has released a smaller, cheaper Claude model called Haiku 4.5 that can reportedly outperform larger models that are only a few months old. In terms of coding skills, Haiku 4.5 performs comparably to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s GPT-5, per the SWE-bench Verified leaderboard. “What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster,” Anthropic suggests, noting that just “five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model” and “today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.”

VentureBeat reports “Anthropic is giving away its powerful Claude Haiku 4.5 AI for free to take on OpenAI,” interpolating the “one-third cost” contention as Anthropic’s charge of “$1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.” When it comes to “operating computers autonomously, Haiku 4.5 actually surpasses its more expensive predecessor.”

CNBC notes that it is “available to Anthropic’s free users, and it’s now the cheapest model available to paid users.” All Claude app users, web users and developers can access Haiku 4.5 via the API.

Anthropic’s announcement explains only that Haiku 4.5 “gives users a new option for when they want near-frontier performance with much greater cost-efficiency.” Claude Sonnet 4.5, released several weeks ago, remains the company’s frontier model and is “the best coding model in the world,” according to Anthropic.

Ars Technica writes that making models smaller, speedy and less expensive, “typically comes at the cost of omitting stored knowledge,” which is great for those who need quick coding assistance, but “if you wanted to converse with an AI model that might craft a deeper and more meaningful analysis of, say, foreign policy or world history, you might be better served talking to Sonnet or Opus.”

“Anthropic’s free users can still choose to use Claude Sonnet 4.5, but they’ll get more capacity out of Claude Haiku 4.5 since it’s smaller,” CNBC reports, quoting Anthropic Chief Product Officer Mike Krieger saying of the dainty newcomer, “it punches way above its weight.”

VentureBeat points out that “the breakneck pace” of Anthropic’s model releases “reflects mounting pressure from OpenAI, whose $500 billion valuation dwarfs Anthropic’s $183 billion.”

But VB thinks the low cost of entry to use Haiku 4.5 “could reshape competitive dynamics in the AI market,” essentially democratizing access to what Anthropic claims is “near-frontier-level intelligence,” a performance level that would have been limited to big-budget enterprise customers as recently as a few months ago.