Claude 4.6 Sonnet vs Claude 4.5 Haiku

As you can see in the graph above, while in October, the use of Claude Sonnet 4.5 Thinking was normal, since the 1st of November, Perplexity has deliberately rerouted most if not ALL Sonnet 4.5 and 4.5 Thinking messages to far worse quality models like Gemini 2 Flash and, interestingly, Claude 4.5 Haiku Thinking which are probably cheaper models.

Perplexity is essentially SCAMMING subscribers by marketing their model as "Sonnet 4.5 Thinking" but then having all prompts given by a different model--still a Claude one so we don't realise!

Very scummy.

Honestly, it isn't a terrible model.

I would put it on par with maybe Claude 4.6 sonnet.

For creativity, as I usually need that for writing. Its pretty excellent. Just not the feeling of a model like opus would.

I don't really use any other model except Kimi K2.6, as that's the best one so far.

For coding, it's pretty good too, though I've only done some html stuff with it.

And the fact it's in preview, just only means there's a hole lot more this model can do! Once it gets better at roleplay (still a bit generic, better than deepseek V3.2 in some way imo). It would be my daily driver most definitely.

[https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6](https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6)

Same price as Sonnet 4.5

Anthropic just dropped Haiku 4.5 and the numbers are wild:

**Performance:**

* 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified (matches Sonnet 4 from 5 months ago)
* 90% of Sonnet 4.5's agentic coding performance
* 2x faster than Sonnet 4
* 4-5x faster than Sonnet 4.5

**Pricing:**

* $1 input / $5 output per million tokens
* That's 66% cheaper than Sonnet 4 ($3/$15)
* \~10x cheaper than Sonnet 4.5 for 90% of the performance

**Why this matters:**

Multi-agent systems are now economically viable. Before Haiku 4.5:

* 10 agents × $15/million = $150/million (too expensive)
* 10 agents × 10s latency = 100s total (too slow)

With Haiku 4.5:

* 10 agents × $5/million = $50/million (3x cheaper)
* 10 agents × 2s latency = 20s total (5x faster)

**Use cases unlocked:**

* Real-time chat assistants (2s response time)
* Automated code reviews (\~$0.01 per review)
* Pair programming with Claude Code (no latency friction)
* Rapid prototyping (iterate as much as you want)

**Available now:**

* Claude.ai
* Claude Code (CLI + extension) - use `/model` command
* API: `model="claude-haiku-4.5-20251015"`
* AWS Bedrock
* Google Cloud Vertex AI

We wrote a deep-dive article (in French, but code examples and benchmarks are universal) with cost analysis, migration guides, and real scenarios: [here](https://cc-france.org/blog/claude-haiku-45-le-modle-qui-redfinit-le-rapport-p)

The barrier between "proof of concept" and "production" just got dramatically lower.

What are you planning to build with it?

Press CTRL+I to invoke Windsurf Command ([documentation)](https://docs.windsurf.com/command/windsurf-overview): this generates code at your cursor, or it edits blocks of text. It never uses any credits.

Also, GPT 5.1 Codex and 5.1 Codex Mini are free in Cascade / chat ([documentation](https://docs.windsurf.com/windsurf/models)).

Anthropic just dropped Haiku 4.5 and the numbers are wild:

**Performance:**

* 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified (matches Sonnet 4 from 5 months ago)
* 90% of Sonnet 4.5's agentic coding performance
* 2x faster than Sonnet 4
* 4-5x faster than Sonnet 4.5

**Pricing:**

* $1 input / $5 output per million tokens
* That's 66% cheaper than Sonnet 4 ($3/$15)
* \~10x cheaper than Sonnet 4.5 for 90% of the performance

**Why this matters:**

Multi-agent systems are now economically viable. Before Haiku 4.5:

* 10 agents × $15/million = $150/million (too expensive)
* 10 agents × 10s latency = 100s total (too slow)

With Haiku 4.5:

* 10 agents × $5/million = $50/million (3x cheaper)
* 10 agents × 2s latency = 20s total (5x faster)

**Use cases unlocked:**

* Real-time chat assistants (2s response time)
* Automated code reviews (\~$0.01 per review)
* Pair programming with Claude Code (no latency friction)
* Rapid prototyping (iterate as much as you want)

**Available now:**

* [Claude.ai](http://Claude.ai)
* Claude Code (CLI + extension) - use `/model` command
* API: `model="claude-haiku-4.5-20251015"`
* AWS Bedrock
* Google Cloud Vertex AI

We wrote a deep-dive article (in French, but code examples and benchmarks are universal) with cost analysis, migration guides, and real scenarios: [here](https://cc-france.org/blog/claude-haiku-45-le-modle-qui-redfinit-le-rapport-p)

The barrier between "proof of concept" and "production" just got dramatically lower.

What are you planning to build with it?