Claude Haiku 4.5 vs o4 Mini

Across our 12-test suite the matchup is largely tied: 9 ties, Claude Haiku 4.5 wins 2 benchmarks (agentic_planning 5 vs 4; safety_calibration 2 vs 1), and o4 Mini wins 1 (structured_output 5 vs 4). Details: - Agentic planning: Haiku 4.5 scores 5 (tied for 1st with 14 others); o4 Mini scores 4 (rank 16/54). This means Haiku is measurably stronger at goal decomposition and failure recovery in our tests. - Safety calibration: Haiku 4.5 scores 2 vs o4 Mini 1; Haiku ranks 12/55 vs o4 at 32/55 — relevant for assistants that must refuse harmful requests reliably. - Structured output: o4 Mini scores 5 (tied for 1st of 54), Claude scores 4 (rank 26/54); o4 Mini is the clear winner for JSON/schema compliance and format adherence. - Ties (both models same score): strategic_analysis 5, constrained_rewriting 3, creative_problem_solving 4, tool_calling 5, faithfulness 5, classification 4, long_context 5, persona_consistency 5, multilingual 5 — in practice these ties mean similar behavior for most editing, long-context retrieval, tool selection, multilingual output, and classification tasks. - External benchmarks: o4 Mini scores 97.8% on MATH Level 5 and 81.7% on AIME 2025 (according to Epoch AI), supporting its strength on competition-style math; Claude Haiku 4.5 has no external percentages in the payload. Overall, Haiku edges the pair on agentic and safety dimensions; o4 Mini edges on structured formats and external math tests.

Using the payload's per-mTok prices (input+output): Claude Haiku 4.5 = $1 + $5 = $6.0 per mTok; o4 Mini = $1.1 + $4.4 = $5.5 per mTok. At 1M tokens/month (1,000 mTok) that's $6,000 for Haiku vs $5,500 for o4 Mini (difference $500). At 10M it's $60,000 vs $55,000; at 100M it's $600,000 vs $550,000. High-volume integrations (multi-million tokens/month) will feel the $500/million-token gap; teams optimizing marginal cost should prefer o4 Mini, while teams prioritizing agentic planning or safer responses may accept the ~9% higher monthly spend for Haiku.

Choose Claude Haiku 4.5 if you need: - stronger agentic planning and recovery (score 5 vs 4) - better safety calibration in our testing (2 vs 1) - long-context, persona, multilingual parity with o4 Mini (ties). Choose o4 Mini if you need: - best-in-class structured output and schema compliance (5 vs 4; rank 1 of 54) - stronger external math performance (97.8% MATH Level 5, 81.7% AIME 2025, Epoch AI) - lower token cost (≈$5,500 vs $6,000 per 1M tokens). If cost at scale matters more than marginal gains in agentic planning or safety, pick o4 Mini; if safer handling and planning are core product requirements, pick Claude Haiku 4.5.