Anthropic’s newest AI model has arrived. But it’s pricier than the last generation, and unlike Anthropic’s other models, it can’t analyze images just yet.
Claude 3.5 Haiku, which Anthropic announced last month, matches or bests the performance of Anthropic’s flagship model, Claude 3 Opus, on specific benchmarks. Available through Anthropic’s API and a number of third-party platforms, including AWS Bedrock, Claude 3.5 Haiku is useful for coding suggestions, data extraction and labeling, and content moderation, Anthropic says.
Anthropic previously suggested that Claude 3.5 Haiku would cost the same as Claude 3 Haiku, its predecessor. Now it’s changing its tune.
“During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks — at a fraction of the cost. As a result, we’ve increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence,” Anthropic wrote in a post on X.
Pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku starts at $1 per million input tokens (~750,000 words) and $5 per million output tokens. That’s versus 25 cents per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens for Claude 3 Haiku — a 4x hike.
Claude 3.5 Haiku also isn’t launching with image analysis features, making it less capable in at least one respect compared to Claude 3 Haiku. Alex Albert, head of developer relations at Anthropic, said on X that Claude 3 Haiku will remain available “for users requiring maximum cost-efficiency and image processing.”
Granted, Claude 3.5 Haiku can output longer chunks of text than Claude 3 Haiku, and the model has a more recent knowledge cutoff (meaning it can reference more recent events). Still, it’s rare for an AI vendor to raise the cost of a model in a series — and raises questions about Anthropic’s pricing strategy moving forward.
