Anthropic has introduced its latest AI model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, at a price four times higher than its predecessor, Claude 3 Opus. The new model costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, compared to the previous pricing of 25 cents and $1.25.
The company justified the price increase by stating that the new model demonstrates enhanced intelligence and outperforms Claude 3 Opus in several technical tests. However, this move has faced criticism from users and developers, questioning its competitiveness against cheaper alternatives like Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash and OpenAI's GPT-4o mini.
Despite offering longer texts and more recent training data, Claude 3.5 Haiku no longer supports image analysis, a popular feature in earlier versions. Anthropic confirmed that the previous model will remain available for those needing these functionalities.
Currently, Claude 3.5 Haiku is accessible only through the Anthropic API and platforms such as AWS Bedrock, and is not listed on the Claude.ai website.