Claude Haiku
Anthropic’s fast, economical Claude tier for high-volume and latency-sensitive work.
Anthropic’s fast, cost-efficient Claude tier for high-volume chat, classification, extraction, and sub-agent steps where latency and price matter more than peak reasoning.
Why Claude Haiku matters
Haiku is how teams keep Claude in the stack when traffic is huge or steps must be cheap and fast—classification, extraction, chat, and worker sub-agents under Sonnet/Opus/Fable orchestrators.
Vision · Tool calling · Thinking · MCP · Coding
Last reviewed: 31 July 2026
When to choose Claude Haiku
Decision guidance for architects—not a feature list.
Best for
- High-volume chat and support
- Classification and extraction
- Fast sub-agent / worker steps
- Cost-sensitive production traffic
Avoid if
- You need peak Claude reasoning or long-horizon agents
- Hard coding and verification loops are the main job
Strengths
Qualitative snapshot for architects—not a public ranking.
- Speed / latency★★★★★
- Cost efficiency★★★★★
- High-volume serving★★★★★
- Hard reasoning★★☆☆☆
- Open weights★☆☆☆☆
Ecosystem
Built by
- Anthropic
Haiku is Anthropic’s fast, cost-efficient Claude serving tier.
Alternative to
- Gemini Flash
Alternative fast proprietary tier when Google Cloud is the stack.
Works with
Recommended for
- AI Agents
Natural fit for high-volume sub-agent and worker steps.
Often paired with
- Claude Sonnet
Common pattern: Haiku for cheap worker steps, Sonnet for main agent reasoning.
How Claude Haiku evolved
Key moments in chronological order.
- Model
Claude Haiku 4.5 era
Fast Claude tier with stronger reasoning at economical rates.
- Platform
Production high-volume default
Becomes the default Claude choice when latency and unit economics dominate.
- Product
Tool use on Haiku
Reliable tool calling makes Haiku practical for high-volume agent workers.
- Model
Claude 3 Haiku launches
Defines Haiku as Anthropic’s speed and cost brand in the Claude family.
- Model
Vision on Haiku
Image understanding lands on the fast tier for multimodal pipelines.
Overview
Capabilities
- Vision: Yes
- Audio: No
- Tool calling: Yes
- Thinking: Yes
- MCP: Yes
- Coding: Yes
- Structured output: Yes
Technical specifications
- Provider
- Anthropic
- License
- Proprietary
- Context window
- 200K
- Parameters
- Undisclosed
- Architecture
- Transformer (proprietary)
- Release
- 2025-10
- Modalities
- Text, Image
- Vision
- Yes
- Audio
- No
- Tool calling
- Yes
- Thinking
- Yes
- MCP
- Yes
- Open weights
- No
- API
- Yes
- Pricing (input)
- Haiku-class API pricing (verify Anthropic)
- Pricing (output)
- Haiku-class API pricing (verify Anthropic)
Supported modalities
Text · Image
Context window
200K (200,000 tokens)
Pricing
Cheapest widely used Claude tier; check current Haiku rates.
Availability
Claude API aliases such as claude-haiku-4-5; verify current IDs.
Use cases
- High-volume chat and support
- Classification and extraction
- Fast sub-agent / worker steps
- Cost-sensitive production traffic
Strengths
- Speed and low latency
- Strong cost efficiency
- Good enough for many tool-calling tasks
Limitations
- Below Sonnet/Opus/Fable on hard reasoning
- Closed weights
- Shorter context than current Pro-tier Claudes
Related guides
Related benchmarks
Related research
- Anthropic research & model cards
Evaluation
Related GitHub
Related tools
Related rankings
Related comparisons
Companies
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