Anthropic surprised users with a major price increase for its new model, Claude 3.5 Haiku, saying the increase reflects “its increase in intelligence.”

Claude AI models are some of the best in the world, going toe-to-toe with OpenAI’s models and often surpassing them. The most recent generations of Claude includes multiple models, such as Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus, in that order from weakest to most powerful. Anthropic says Claude 3.5 Haiku is a major improvement over the previous generation’s most capable model, Claude 3 Opus.

Claude 3.5 Haiku is the next generation of our fastest model. For a similar speed to Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3.5 Haiku improves across every skill set and surpasses Claude 3 Opus, the largest model in our previous generation, on many intelligence benchmarks.

Unfortunately for users, Anthropic has raised the price for Claude 3.5 Haiku by 4 times.

Pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku starts at $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, with up to 90% cost savings with prompt caching and 50% cost savings with the Message Batches API. To learn more, check out our pricing page.

The new price is in comparison to $0.25 cents per million input tokens, and $1.25 per million output tokens for Claude 3 Haiku.

In a post on X, Anthropic explained its decision.

The news is not going over well with users, with some of them pointing out that Claude 3.5 Haiku offers similar performance as OpenAI’s GPT-4o-mini, yet is significantly more expensive.