Anthropic has just announced Claude Haiku 4.5, a new lightweight AI model that’s fast enough to power real-time experiences and smart enough to rival its bigger sibling, Claude Sonnet 4. And in a major move, it’s available for free to all claude.ai users starting today.
Just two weeks after rolling out Sonnet 4.5, Anthropic's latest launch promises superior intelligence wrapped in a lightweight package that supports chatting, coding and workflows.
Meet Haiku 4.5
Small but mighty, Claude Haiku 4.5 outperforms Sonnet 4 making Claude for Chrome faster than ever. Here's where it shines:
- Latency / Speed: Haiku 4.5 is significantly faster than Sonnet 4.5. It’s built for low-latency use cases like real-time chatbots and agents.
- Parallel execution: You can deploy multiple Haiku 4.5 agents in parallel, completing tasks faster than a single Sonnet 4.5 instance could.
- Computer control / interface actions: Anthropic says Haiku 4.5 even outperforms Sonnet 4 in "using computers" (i.e., interface navigation, tool control, rapid response).
- Scalability for agentic use cases: Its lower cost makes it better for running multiple concurrent agents (Sonnet plans, Haiku executes).
A vibe coding assistant
Because Haiku is designed to scale, users can now deploy multiple Haiku 4.5 agents in parallel, assigning sub-tasks like code refactoring or document synthesis while a larger model like Sonnet 4.5 coordinates the overall plan.
Anthropic says this multi-agent flow is ideal for complex builds, financial monitoring and even large-scale research.
For real-world use cases, that means faster, more responsive chatting, sub-agent execution when coding and compliance tracking. This could also be a game changer for research with parallelized data gathering, literature reviews and synthesis, giving users time back.
It also suggests faster in-browser assistance for anyone using Claude for Chrome.
Available free for all Claude users
Haiku 4.5 is now available to all free claude.ai plans. Users do not need a subscription to use one of the fastest, smartest models available today. With this rollout, Anthropic is betting big on speed, trust and accessibility while still prioritizing safety.
This launch also opens the door for a new class of “free agents” or, lightweight AI agents that run at low cost with high performance.
According to Anthropic, Haiku 4.5 makes agentic AI at scale economically viable, especially when building tools that rely on fast, intelligent responses in real time.
The takeaway
Like all Claude models, Haiku 4.5 is trained with Anthropic’s constitutional AI and safety guardrails in place. But unlike the heavier models, it’s tuned for speed and responsiveness, giving users a faster, more intelligence model designed for efficiency.
Anthropic’s mission with Haiku 4.5 underscores their goal to democratize advanced AI while making multi-agent systems available to everyone without a subscription.
It's available today, so give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments.
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