Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Gemini 3.5 Flash

Claude Haiku 4.5 is Anthropic’s lightweight model in the Claude 4.5 series, released in October 2025 under a proprietary license. Designed for speed and cost efficiency, it delivers near-frontier performance while maintaining Anthropic’s AI Safety Level 2 standard. Haiku 4.5 supports both text and multimodal (text and image) inputs, integrates tool use and extended reasoning, and features a 200,000 token context window, making it adept at handling long or complex workflows. Though the parameter count remains undisclosed, it achieves about 73.3% on SWE-bench Verified, reflecting strong coding and reasoning ability. Haiku 4.5 is ideal for developers and researchers seeking rapid, cost-effective model calls for analysis, coding, or multimodal understanding.

Gemini 3.5 Flash is a multimodal language model developed by Google DeepMind and released at Google I/O 2026. It is built on the Gemini 3 Flash reasoning foundation and introduces configurable thinking levels (minimal, low, medium, and high) that allow developers to tune the depth of internal reasoning before a response is generated. The model accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs and produces text output, with a 1 million token context window and up to 65,000 output tokens per request. It is natively multimodal, processing visual inputs alongside text to support tasks such as image captioning, classification, optical character recognition, object detection, and visual grounding, where the model references specific regions within an image or video frame.

Its vision capabilities extend to interpreting UI screenshots, diagrams, charts, and real-world scenes, as well as understanding video and live frame sequences for activity and scene recognition. The model supports combined tool use, including Google Search, URL context, code execution, and custom functions, within a single request, and it uses reasoning context from previous turns when thought signatures are present in the conversation history, enabling persistent multi-turn reasoning chains. Gemini 3.5 Flash carries a knowledge cutoff of January 2026 and is available via the Gemini API, Google AI Studio, Google Antigravity, and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.