Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Haiku with price rise and feature trade-offs amid AI competition
The new Claude 3.5 Haiku model is priced four times higher than its predecessor.
Anthropic has unveiled Claude 3.5 Haiku, its latest AI model, which claims to outperform its previous flagship model, Claude 3 Opus. Designed for tasks such as coding support, data extraction, and content moderation, Claude 3.5 Haiku is now available on Anthropic’s API and several third-party platforms, including AWS Bedrock. Despite improvements, the new model lacks image analysis features, which its predecessor Claude 3 Haiku offers.
A price hike for Claude 3.5 Haiku has surprised many, as Anthropic previously suggested pricing would remain consistent with its older model. However, after outperforming Claude 3 Opus in final tests, Anthropic increased the model’s price to match its enhanced performance. The revised cost is now $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens — a fourfold increase from Claude 3 Haiku’s pricing.
Claude 3.5 Haiku provides advantages in text output length and an updated knowledge cutoff, enabling it to handle more recent information than Claude 3 Haiku. Despite this, the absence of image analysis functionality may lead some users to stick with the earlier, more affordable Claude 3 Haiku.
The unexpected price increase raises questions about Anthropic’s pricing approach as competition intensifies in the AI industry. As new models are developed, balancing enhanced features with accessibility is expected to remain a challenge for AI companies.
