Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 4.5, a smaller, cheaper AI model
Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in 2025.
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic on Wednesday announced Claude Haiku 4.5, a small artificial intelligence model that’s available as a lower-cost offering for all of the company’s users.
The model is fast and can outperform other larger models that were considered cutting edge just months ago, Anthropic said.
Claude Haiku 4.5 is better at using computers than Claude Sonnet 4, for instance, which is a midsized model the company launched in May. It performs similarly to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s most recent model, GPT-5, at coding, according to SWE-bench Verified, a test set that measures an AI system’s software coding abilities.
“It punches way above its weight,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, told CNBC in an interview.
Claude Haiku 4.5 is available to Anthropic’s free users, and it’s now the cheapest model available to paid users.
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Anthropic is an AI startup that develops a family of large language models called Claude. The company assigns new numbers to the models as they advance across generations, but the smallest model in the family is typically called Haiku, the midsized model is called Sonnet and the largest model is Opus.
After OpenAI burst onto the scene with the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, Anthropic launched a rival product, Claude, the following year. It’s powered by Anthropic’s family of models, and users can choose between free and paid tiers.
The launch of Claude Haiku 4.5 comes just weeks after the company announced Claude Sonnet 4.5 in September and Claude Opus 4.1 in August. Anthropic is working to release another model, likely an updated version of Opus, by the end of this year or early next year, Krieger said.
For paid users, Haiku models are typically around one-third of the cost of Anthropic’s Sonnet models, while Sonnet models are one-fifth of the cost of its Opus models, Krieger said. 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, he added.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is still Anthropic’s best-performing model, but the company said Claude Haiku 4.5 is ideal for users looking for fast, accurate answers.
“Even for my own use, even though it is not as smart as Sonnet, I’ve started defaulting to it on Claude, especially in the mobile app, because it’s just much faster getting an answer,” Krieger said.
The two models can also work together. Anthropic said Claude Sonnet 4.5 can create multi-step plans to solve complex problems, and Claude Haiku 4.5 can complete subtasks within those plans, for example.
Running the models in parallel could be particularly useful for businesses that want to use AI to tackle longer-term projects, Krieger said.
“You could have Haiku monitoring financial streams of data – and because it’s a smaller, cheaper, faster model, it can do that at a higher volume – and then pass off its early insights to Sonnet to do some deeper analysis,” he said.
Anthropic, which was No. 4 on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list and is valued at $183 billion, serves more than 300,000 business customers. Its annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, according to an Anthropic spokesperson.
The company has been racing to keep up with competitors like Google and OpenAI, whose valuation has swelled to $500 billion. Following the launch of GPT-5 in August, OpenAI has inked several multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals and released a short-form video app called Sora.
The breakneck pace of the industry doesn’t afford Anthropic much time to get comfortable after a launch. While the company was carrying out the training for Claude Sonnet 4.5, it had already kicked off work on Claude Haiku 4.5.
“We’re really firing on all cylinders,” Krieger said.
WATCH: Anthropic unveils overseas hiring push as rivalry with OpenAI goes global
CEO of Palantir Technologies Alex Karp attends the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., July 15, 2025.
Nathan Howard | Reuters
It’s been a tough November for Palantir.
Shares of the software analytics provider dropped 16% for their worst month since August 2023 as investors dumped AI stocks due to valuation fears. Meanwhile, famed investor Michael Burry doubled down on the artificial intelligence trade and bet against the company.
Palantir started November off on a high note.
The Denver-based company topped Wall Street’s third-quarter earnings and revenue expectations. Palantir also posted its second-straight $1 billion revenue quarter, but high valuation concerns contributed to a post-print selloff.
In a note to clients, Jefferies analysts called Palantir’s valuation “extreme” and argued investors would find better risk-reward in AI names such as Microsoft and Snowflake. Analysts at RBC Capital Markets raised concerns about the company’s “increasingly concentrated growth profile,” while Deutsche Bank called the valuation “very difficult to wrap our heads around.”
Adding fuel to the post-earnings selloff was the revelation that Burry is betting against Palantir and AI chipmaker Nvidia. Burry, who is widely known for predicting the housing crisis that occurred in 2008 and the portrayal of him in the film “The Big Short,” later accused hyperscalers of artificially boosting earnings.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp vocally hit the front lines, appearing twice in one week on CNBC, where he accused Burry of “market manipulation” and called the investor’s actions “egregious.”
“The idea that chips and ontology is what you want to short is bats— crazy,” Karp told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Despite the vicious selloff, Palantir has notched some deal wins this month. That included a multiyear contract with consulting firm PwC to speed up AI adoption in the U.K. and a deal with aircraft engine maintenance company FTAI.
But those announcements did little to shake off valuation worries that have haunted all AI-tied companies in November.
Across the board, investors have viciously ditched the high-priced group, citing fears of stretched valuations and a bubble.
In November, Nvidia pulled back more than 12%, while Microsoft and Amazon dropped about 5% each. Quantum computing names such as Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum have shed more than a third of their value.
Apple and Alphabet were the only Magnificent 7 stocks to end the month with gains.
Sill, questions linger over Palantir’s valuation, and those worries aren’t a new concern.
Even after its steep price drop, the company’s stock trades at 233 times forward earnings. By comparison, Nvidia and Alphabet traded at about 38 times and 30 times, respectively, at Friday’s close.
Karp, who has long defended the company, didn’t miss an opportunity to clap back at his critics, arguing in a letter to shareholders that the company is making it feasible for everyday investors to attain rates of return once “limited to the most successful venture capitalists in Palo Alto.”
“Please turn on the conventional television and see how unhappy those that didn’t invest in us are,” Karp said during an earnings call. “Enjoy, get some popcorn. They’re crying. We are every day making this company better, and we’re doing it for this nation, for allied countries.”
Palantir declined to comment for this story.
WATCH: Palantir CEO Alex Karp: We’ve printed venture results for the average American
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