Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026. It calls it the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model it has released, aimed at high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summaries, classification and live customer support.
What to know
- It is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort setting, so you can trade cost for intelligence.
- Anthropic lists prices per million tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens: $0.10 for input and $0.50 for output. Prompts over 100,000 tokens cost $0.50 and $2.50. Haiku 4.5 was $1 and $5.
- Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average, and its footnotes note that an updated tokenizer uses slightly more tokens per task.
- It is available on the Claude Platform as
claude-haiku-5-5and on Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. - Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain the better choice for complex agentic coding, and positions Haiku 5.5 for narrower tasks and subagent work.
Other changes announced
- Cache reads for Claude Sonnet 5.5 now cost $0.10 per million tokens, down from $0.20, which Anthropic says cuts Sonnet 5.5 costs on most agentic work by around 20%.
- Claude Max and Team subscribers get a monthly API credit: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x and up to $500, pooled, for Team.
Disclosure: Anthropic’s Claude is one of the tools used to help build this site. We cover Claude models on the same basis as every other maker.
Source: Anthropic. We summarise in our own words; check the source for the full details.