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.

We are all reasonable people here, and while you are (mostly) correct, I think we can all agree that Anthropic documentation sucks. If I have to infer from the doc:

* Haiku 4.5 by default doesn't think, i.e. it has a default thinking budget of 0.

* By setting a non-zero thinking budget, Haiku 4.5 can think. My guess is that Claude Code may set this differently for different tasks, e.g. thinking for Explore, no thinking for Compact.

* This hybrid thinking is different from the adaptive thinking introduced in Opus 4.6, which when enabled, can automatically adjust the thinking level based on task difficulty.