DeepSeek V4 vs Claude Haiku 4.5
DeepSeek V4 and Claude Haiku 4.5 side by side: what each one is, and the full review of each.
DeepSeek V4
Open weightsDeepSeek's open-weights frontier family, previewed April 24, 2026. V4-Pro is 1.6T total / 49B active params; V4-Flash is 284B / 13B. 1M context standard. Weights on Hugging Face.
Claude Haiku 4.5
Anthropic's smallest Claude 4.5 model, released October 2025 and succeeded by Haiku 5.5 in October 2026. Sonnet 4-level coding at one-third the cost. $1/$5 per million tokens.
At a glance
| Field | | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | AI Models | AI Models |
| Website | api-docs.deepseek.com | anthropic.com |
In Depth
DeepSeek V4
DeepSeek V4 is the open-weights frontier release of mid-2026, shipped in two mixture-of-experts variants: DeepSeek-V4-Pro at 1.6T total / 49B active parameters and DeepSeek-V4-Flash at 284B total / 13B active. A 1M token context window is now the default across all official DeepSeek services, and the weights are open-sourced on Hugging Face. The API supports both OpenAI ChatCompletions and Anthropic Messages formats, which makes it close to a drop-in swap in existing codebases, and the legacy `deepseek-chat` and `deepseek-reasoner` endpoints retire after July 24, 2026. For teams that want self-hostable, frontier-adjacent capability at a fraction of closed-model pricing, V4 became the open-weights reference point of mid-2026.
Claude Haiku 4.5
Claude Haiku 4.5 is the Anthropic small model released in October 2025 and available through the Claude API as `claude-haiku-4-5`. Its successor, Claude Haiku 5.5, shipped on October 7, 2026. It delivers coding performance comparable to Claude Sonnet 4 at roughly a third of the cost, and runs up to 4-5x faster than Sonnet 4.5. It is the first Haiku model to ship with extended thinking, computer use, and context awareness, putting agent-grade capabilities into the cheapest tier of the Claude family. Pricing is $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, making it the default choice for high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads and multi-agent swarms where cost per call compounds quickly. Available on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, and Vertex AI.
