Breaking

Anthropic Releases Claude Haiku 5.5 With Lower Prices and Stronger Small-Model Benchmarks

October 7, 2026 at 14:42 EDT

Foundation Models
AI Agents
Software Dev & Coding

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, positioning the new small model as a cheaper, faster workhorse for high-volume AI applications. The launch brings a 1 million-token context window, adaptive effort controls and sharply lower pricing to the Haiku tier, while Anthropic says its larger Sonnet and Opus models remain better suited to the hardest agentic coding jobs.

October 7, 2026 · Anthropic

Claude Haiku 5.5 moves the small-model price line

Anthropic's new Haiku model targets high-volume work with a 1M-token context window, adaptive effort controls and short-prompt pricing that undercuts the previous Haiku generation.

75%

average cost reduction versus Haiku 4.5

tokens in the context window

128K

maximum standard output tokens

90%

lower token price for prompts up to 100K

Short-prompt output price per 1M tokens

Vertical stacks are proportional to price. Lower columns mean lower cost.

Where the model fits

Classify

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Summarize

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Retrieve details

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Assist larger agents

Upside

Early users point to faster enterprise workflows, lower latency, cheaper repeated calls and a practical role as a subagent for scoped work.

Caution

The lowest price tier depends on prompt length, the tokenizer changes budgets, and larger Claude models remain preferred for complex agentic coding.

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