In March 2024 Anthropic announced that two of its next‑generation Claude 3 models – Haiku and Sonnet – had entered general availability on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform.
This partnership brings Anthropic’s safety‑focused generative AI models to one of the world’s most widely used enterprise AI ecosystems, creating opportunities for large organisations to build sophisticated applications with secure cloud infrastructure.
Below we summarise what Claude 3 on Vertex AI means for enterprises as of March 2024 and outline key considerations for product development and solution design.
Claude 3 Family on Vertex AI
Claude 3 Haiku
Haiku is designed to deliver quick responses with low latency and favourable cost‑performance. It excels at everyday office tasks such as draughting emails, summarising documents, and answering customer support queries.
On Vertex AI, Haiku allows enterprises to scale high‑volume generative workloads without incurring excessive compute costs. Its smaller footprint makes it ideal for chatbots, dynamic content generation and analysis of moderate‑length documents.
Claude 3 Sonnet
Sonnet balances speed and capability. It offers deeper reasoning skills, better coherence over long contexts and improved factual accuracy compared with Haiku, while remaining cost‑effective.
In March 2024 Sonnet became generally available on Vertex AI, giving enterprises access to a versatile model suitable for advanced document summarisation, research assistants, complex question answering, coding assistance and multi‑turn chat experiences.
Vertex AI Integration
API and console access: Enterprise customers can access Haiku and Sonnet through Vertex AI’s Model Garden interface and API, alongside models from Google and other partners. This simplifies deployment for teams already working within Google Cloud’s data and ML environment.
Customisation and fine‑tuning: Vertex AI provides tools to customise models with domain‑specific data (for example, financial reports, legal briefs) without training from scratch. Haiku and sonnet can be adapted using prompt tuning and retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), allowing enterprises to ground responses in trusted sources.
Security and compliance: Running Claude 3 models on Google Cloud ensures enterprise‑grade data privacy and compliance controls. Traffic stays within Google’s cloud infrastructure, meeting regulatory requirements for sensitive sectors such as healthcare, finance and government.
Why This Matters for Enterprises
Increased Choice and Flexibility
By offering Anthropic’s models on Vertex AI, Google Cloud expands its generative‑AI portfolio. Enterprises now have more options when selecting a model that matches their performance and cost objectives.
Haiku suits high‑volume, low‑latency workloads; Sonnet provides stronger reasoning while remaining affordable. Organisations can compare these models with Google’s in‑house offerings to choose the best fit.
Streamlined Development Workflows
Vertex AI integrates seamlessly with other Google Cloud services. Data pipelines (BigQuery, Cloud Storage) and MLOps tools (Vertex AI Pipelines, Monitoring) can feed directly into Claude 3 models, enabling end‑to‑end workflows from data ingestion and prompt engineering to deployment and monitoring.
AI Developers can prototype in the console, deploy models through managed endpoints and monitor latency and usage metrics in one place.
Advanced Safety and Control
Anthropic is known for prioritising AI safety. Claude 3 models incorporate safety mitigations and are designed to follow explicit instructions while refusing harmful requests.
Enterprises using Haiku or Sonnet on Vertex AI benefit from these guardrails plus Google’s security. Fine‑tuning with domain data further reduces hallucinations and ensures outputs align with corporate policies.
Use Cases
Knowledge management: Use Sonnet to summarise long policy documents, meeting transcripts and research articles. Its ability to maintain context across hundreds of pages enables comprehensive question answering and synthesis.
Customer service: Deploy Haiku to power multilingual chatbots or virtual assistants that answer FAQs, troubleshoot issues and draft support responses. Low latency keeps conversations smooth, improving customer satisfaction.
Research and analytics: Leverage Sonnet for competitive analysis, risk assessment and report generation. Combine it with Vertex AI’s BigQuery integration to analyse structured data and produce narrative summaries.
Software development: Sonnet can assist ai developers by generating code snippets, explaining APIs and reviewing large codebases. Integration with Vertex AI’s toolchain ensures results can be incorporated into CI/CD workflows.
Considerations for Implementation
Cost management: While Haiku is cost‑efficient, processing long contexts with Sonnet may incur higher costs. Enterprises should benchmark inference costs under expected workloads and consider prompt tuning or caching strategies to reduce repeated calls.
Data privacy: Always implement strict access controls and encryption for data used in fine‑tuning or prompt retrieval to ensure compliance with industry regulations.
Evaluation and monitoring: Continuously evaluate model outputs for accuracy, bias and hallucinations. Implement a feedback loop so users can flag problematic responses. Track performance metrics via Vertex AI’s monitoring tools to detect drift or anomalies.
Skill development: Teams will need to adopt prompt engineering and RAG techniques to maximise model accuracy. Training and documentation should be provided to ai developers and domain experts.
Conclusion
Anthropic’s Haiku and Sonnet models on Google Cloud’s Vertex AI provide enterprises with powerful, safe generative‑AI tools as of March 2024.
Haiku offers low‑latency, cost‑efficient text generation for everyday tasks, while Sonnet delivers deeper reasoning and larger context handling.
Together they expand the options available to organisations looking to integrate generative AI into their products, services and operations. W
ith Google Cloud’s infrastructure, customisation capabilities and security, enterprises can build and deploy AI solutions that meet performance, compliance and safety requirements.
As generative AI adoption accelerates, Anthropic’s partnership with Vertex AI represents an important milestone in making advanced models accessible and trustworthy for enterprise use.
