Not sure what this means, but as a marketing person myself, here's what happened: One day, an Anthropican involved in the Haiku 4.5 launch shrugged, weighed the odds of getting spanked for equating "extended thinking" with "reasoning", and then used Claude to generate copy declaring that. It's not rocket surgery!

It's mainly that people on here, regardless of profession, speak incorrectly but confidentally about things that could be easily verified with a Google search or basic familiarity with the thing in question.

Haiku 4.5 is a reasoning model, regardless of whatever hallucination you read. Being a hybrid reasoning model means that, depending on the complexity of the question and whether you explicitly enable reasoning (this is "extended thinking" in the API and other interfaces) when making a request to the LLM, it will emit reasoning tokens separately prior to the tokens used in the main response.

I love your theory that there was some mix up on their side because they were lazy and it was just some marketing dude being quirky with the technical language.