Best Small Language Models for Claude Code

Anthropic has introduced Claude Haiku 4.5, its newest small language model aimed at achieving near-frontier capabilities at a significantly reduced cost. This model mirrors the coding and reasoning abilities of the company's mid-tier Sonnet 4, yet operates at approximately one-third of the expense while delivering over double the processing speed. According to benchmarks highlighted by Anthropic, Haiku 4.5 either matches or surpasses the performance of Sonnet 4 in critical areas such as code generation and intricate "computer use" workflows. The model is specifically optimized for scenarios requiring real-time, low-latency performance, making it ideal for applications like chat assistants, customer support, and pair-programming. Available through the Claude API under the designation “claude-haiku-4-5,” Haiku 4.5 is designed for large-scale implementations where cost-effectiveness, responsiveness, and advanced intelligence are essential. Now accessible on Claude Code and various applications, this model's efficiency allows users to achieve greater productivity within their usage confines while still enjoying top-tier performance. Moreover, its launch marks a significant step forward in providing businesses with affordable yet high-quality AI solutions.

GLM-4.5V-Flash is a vision-language model that is open source and specifically crafted to integrate robust multimodal functionalities into a compact and easily deployable framework. It accommodates various types of inputs including images, videos, documents, and graphical user interfaces, facilitating a range of tasks such as understanding scenes, parsing charts and documents, reading screens, and analyzing multiple images. In contrast to its larger counterparts, GLM-4.5V-Flash maintains a smaller footprint while still embodying essential visual language model features such as visual reasoning, video comprehension, handling GUI tasks, and parsing complex documents. This model can be utilized within “GUI agent” workflows, allowing it to interpret screenshots or desktop captures, identify icons or UI components, and assist with both automated desktop and web tasks. While it may not achieve the performance enhancements seen in the largest models, GLM-4.5V-Flash is highly adaptable for practical multimodal applications where efficiency, reduced resource requirements, and extensive modality support are key considerations. Its design ensures that users can harness powerful functionalities without sacrificing speed or accessibility.

SubQ 1.1 Small is the second iteration of Subquadratic’s long-context AI model, built to help enterprises solve problems that require reasoning across entire artifacts rather than isolated chunks. The model is designed for use cases involving large code repositories, document libraries, legal agreements, financial reports, contracts, and other complex information sets. Its Subquadratic Sparse Attention architecture reduces the compute burden of traditional dense attention, making it more practical to process multi-million-token contexts. SubQ 1.1 Small achieves near-perfect performance on needle-in-a-haystack retrieval tests up to 12M tokens, despite being trained primarily at 1M tokens. It also performs strongly on RULER, GPQA Diamond, LiveCodeBench, and AutomationBench Finance, showing a balance between long-context retrieval and general reasoning ability. At 1M tokens, the model uses 64.5x less compute than dense attention and runs 56x faster than FlashAttention-2 on a single attention layer. This efficiency makes long-context training and inference more scalable for enterprise AI applications. SubQ 1.1 Small is especially valuable for teams that need to analyze relationships across full documents, trace logic across codebases, or connect information across extensive collections. The model is intended to help organizations reduce dependence on complex retrieval workarounds and reason more directly over large-scale data.

Ling 3.0 Tiny is a reasoning model featuring open weights, comprising 7.9 billion total parameters and 1.3 billion active parameters, alongside a substantial context window of 262,000 tokens. Leveraging a mixture-of-experts architecture, it pushes the boundaries of the open-weights Pareto frontier in terms of intelligence relative to active parameters, while being compact enough for local deployment in various environments. Scoring 25 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, it stands on par with gpt-oss-120b, which scores 24, despite utilizing 15 times fewer total parameters and 4 times fewer active parameters. This impressive parameter efficiency does come with a trade-off, as it requires a significant 213 million output tokens to complete the Intelligence Index evaluation. In addition, Ling 3.0 Tiny exhibits noteworthy advancements in reducing hallucination tendencies compared to Ling-mini-2.0; it enhances its AA-Omniscience score by 59 points while keeping accuracy levels consistent. Notably, rather than making random guesses in uncertain situations, the model chose to attempt only 37% of the questions during evaluation, leading to a markedly reduced hallucination rate of 30%, a significant improvement over the previous generation's 96%. This strategic approach not only demonstrates the model's improved reasoning capabilities but also highlights its potential for more reliable real-world applications.