Anthropic’s newest AI model is now available, but Claude 3.5 Haiku costs 4 times more than its predecessor.

The new Claude 3.5 Haiku costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output, that’s a huge increase compared to the 25-cent input per million and $1.25 output per million of the previous model.

Anthropic had initially claimed the new AI model would remain at the same price point as the older version, but the company took to X to say that the price would increase due to higher results than expected in benchmarks.

The tweet read, “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,”

It’s worth noting that this new 3.5 Haiku is far more powerful than the previous 3 Haiku AI model with a more up-to-date knowledge base and the ability to write longer text answers. It may be more powerful, but it’s still missing some features found in the older model such as image analysis. Anthropic has said Claude 3 Haiku will remain available for users who want to use the image processing that the new 3.5 Haiku is missing. Anthropic says image input will arrive at a later date.

Claude 3.5 Haiku

Claude 3.5 Haiku is a more advanced version of the cheaper 3 Haiku and Anthropic says it outperforms the company’s previous flagship AI model, Claude 3 Opus.

In that sense 3.5 Haiku is worth the increased cost, allowing users to access a far more powerful AI at a lower cost than 3 Opus which is priced at $15 per million input tokens and $75 per million output tokens. If Anthropic’s claim that 3.5 Haiku outperformed 3 Opus on benchmarks is true then the 4x price hike compared to 3 Haiku is far easier to digest.

Claude 3.5 Haiku is available now and you can request API access directly from Anthropic’s website.

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