Inkling Small vs Claude Haiku 4.5
Side-by-side comparison of API pricing, specs, benchmarks, and capabilities
| Specification |
Inkling SmallIntro price
|
by Anthropic
|
|---|---|---|
| Overview | ||
| Status | Current budget Open weights | Current budget |
| Released | Jul 30, 2026 | Oct 15, 2025 |
| Pricing per million tokens | ||
| Input | $0.300/Mtok | $1.00/Mtok |
| Output | $1.20/Mtok | $5.00/Mtok |
| Blended avg | $0.525/Mtok | $2.00/Mtok |
| Cached input | $0.060/Mtok | $0.100/Mtok |
| Specifications | ||
| Context window | 262K tokens | 200K tokens |
| Parameters | 276B total / 12B active | Proprietary |
| Speed (TPS) | — | — |
| Modalities | ||
| Input |
textimageaudio
|
textimage
|
| Benchmarks sources: Artificial Analysis / Vellum LLM Leaderboard | ||
| Independent composite scores measured for both models — each on its own scale | ||
| AA Intelligence Index | 40.2 | 29.6 |
| AA Agentic Index | 30.8 | 16.4 |
| AA-Omniscience Index (−100–100) | -9 | -4.2 |
| LMSYS Chatbot Arena | 1430.5 ELO | 1412.2 ELO |
| Per-benchmark results published for Claude Haiku 4.5 only — no independent per-benchmark scores exist for Inkling Small yet | ||
| Avg benchmark score | — | 65.5 |
| Perf / dollar | — | 32.8 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 73 |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | — | 27.5 |
| MCP Atlas | — | 40.2 |
| AIME 2025 | — | 96.3 |
| MMMLU | — | 83 |
| HumanEval | — | 73.3 |
| MATH 500 | — | 78 vendor |
| Providers | ||
| Available from |
Thinking Machines — $0.300/$1.20/Mtok
|
Anthropic — $1.00/$5.00/Mtok
|
Cost at scale
1M tokens · 50/50 input/output| Volume | Inkling Small | Claude Haiku 4.5 | Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M tokens | $0.52 | $2 | $1.48 (74%) |
| 10M tokens | $5.25 | $20 | $14.75 (73.8%) |
| 100M tokens | $52.5 | $200 | $147.5 (73.8%) |
| 1000M tokens | $525 | $2000 | $1475 (73.8%) |
When to pick which
distilled from the pricing and spec data above- cost dominates: $0.525/Mtok blended vs $2.00 — 73.8% less on the same 50/50 token mix
- you need the longer context: 262K tokens vs 200K (1.3×)
- you want open weights — self-host it, fine-tune it, or exit the API entirely; Claude Haiku 4.5 is closed
- your workload re-reads context (agents, RAG, long chats): cached input costs $0.100/Mtok — 90% off its list input price
Summary
Inkling Small by Thinking Machines costs $0.300/Mtok input and $1.20/Mtok output, with a 262K-token context window. It supports text, image, audio input.
Claude Haiku 4.5 by Anthropic costs $1.00/Mtok input and $5.00/Mtok output, with a 200K-token context window. It supports text, image input.
On a blended cost basis, Inkling Small is 73.8% cheaper than Claude Haiku 4.5.It also has a larger context window.
The two aren't directly comparable on average benchmark score: Claude Haiku 4.5 has published per-benchmark results, while Inkling Small does not yet — it is measured today on independent composites (see the table above).
Note: Pricing is per million tokens. Actual costs vary with usage patterns, prompt caching, and batch discounts. Always verify against official provider pricing pages.