Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Gemini 4 Argon

Claude Haiku 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal language model from Anthropic and the smallest member of the Claude 5.5 family, released on October 7, 2026 after Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with a 1M token context window and up to 128K output tokens per request. It is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort parameter: adaptive thinking is on by default and the model decides how much to reason, steered by effort levels from low to max with medium as the default. Its training data cutoff is June 2026. Pricing starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens, which Anthropic reports is about 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests in that range.

Anthropic positions Haiku 5.5 for high-volume, latency-sensitive work such as classification, extraction, routing, summarization, and subagent tasks, and describes it as its fastest model to date at standard speed. On visual and agentic evaluations reported at launch, it scores 46.4% on Chartography, a chart reading benchmark, compared with 6.4% for Haiku 4.5 and 61.6% for Sonnet 5.5, and 72.4% on the offline subset of OSWorld 2.1, a screenshot driven computer use benchmark, compared with 15.7% for Haiku 4.5. It uses the same tokenizer as Claude Opus 4.7 and later models, so the same text counts as roughly 30% more tokens than on Haiku 4.5.

Gemini 4 Argon is Google DeepMind's frontier Gemini 4 model, built to sustain extended reasoning across long-horizon workflows in software engineering, enterprise knowledge work such as legal and finance, scientific analysis, and defensive cybersecurity. It accepts text, image, video, and document input and returns text, operating over a one million token context window. The model raises the maximum output length to one million tokens, compared with a 64K ceiling on earlier Gemini releases, so a single reasoning trajectory can run for hundreds of thousands of tokens before terminating.

On the visual side, Argon targets multimodal document comprehension, professional chart analysis, and retrieval of specific details from long recordings, reporting 91.7% on LVBench for long-video understanding and 71.6% on Chartography for chart reasoning. Google also reports 77.9% on DeepSWE v1.1, 51.3% on AutomationBench, 68% on CWE-bench v1, and first place on the Vals Index, which aggregates finance, coding, legal, and tax tasks. Following Gemini API conventions, it localizes objects by emitting bounding boxes as [ymin, xmin, ymax, xmax] integers normalized to a 0 to 1000 range, which supports prompt driven detection and grounding alongside captioning, document parsing, and visual question answering. Google describes adversarial training and automated red teaming for indirect prompt injection resistance, plus chain-of-thought and action monitors that halt execution when behavior drifts outside user intent.