Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Gemma 4 31B

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.

Gemma 4 31B is the largest dense model in Google's Gemma 4 family, built from the same research as Gemini 3 and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license. It supports a 256K token context window with text and image input, configurable thinking mode for step-by-step reasoning, and multilingual support across 140+ languages. The unquantized model fits on a single 80GB GPU.

For vision tasks, Gemma 4 31B supports image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and can output structured bounding boxes for UI element detection, making it useful for document parsing and UI understanding. Compared to Gemma 3, it delivers stronger reasoning and multimodal performance. It is part of a four-size family alongside the 26B A4B MoE variant and two on-device models (E2B, E4B), with the 31B dense variant optimized for output quality and fine-tuning over inference speed.