Claude Haiku 4.5 vs Qwen-VL

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.

Qwen-VL is a large vision-language model released in August 2023 by the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud. Built on the 7-billion-parameter Qwen language model with an added visual receptor based on Openclip ViT-bigG, the model accepts images, text, and bounding box coordinates as inputs, and can produce both text and bounding boxes as outputs. Qwen-VL processes images at 448×448 resolution, higher than the 224×224 input used by many contemporaneous vision-language models, which supports finer-grained visual recognition and text-heavy tasks such as OCR. This design supports a range of multimodal tasks in a single model, including image captioning, visual question answering, visual grounding, text recognition, and image-conditioned dialogue, with native support for English, Chinese, and multilingual conversation.

At release, Qwen-VL achieved competitive results against contemporaneous vision-language models across zero-shot captioning, general VQA, text-oriented VQA, and referring expression comprehension benchmarks. A chat-tuned variant, Qwen-VL-Chat, is optimized for interactive use with instruction-following and multi-turn conversation. The model is distributed under the Tongyi Qianwen License, a custom license from Alibaba Cloud with specific terms that should be reviewed prior to commercial use. Qwen-VL is the first generation of Alibaba's open multimodal series and precedes the later Qwen2-VL and Qwen2.5-VL releases.