Breaking

Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 as lower-cost small model for high-volume AI tasks

October 7, 2026 at 14:41 EDT

Foundation Models
AI Agents
Software Dev & Coding

Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, positioning it as its cheapest, fastest and most capable small Claude model for high-volume work. The company says the model costs about 75% less to run on average than Claude Haiku 4.5 while targeting classification, extraction, routing, summaries, compaction, database queries, live support, browser use and subagent coding work.

Oct. 7, 2026 · Anthropic

Haiku 5.5 cuts the cost of small Claude tasks

The new small model targets high-volume classification, extraction, routing, support, browser use and subagent work while cutting average running cost by about 75% versus Haiku 4.5.

75%

lower average running cost

token context window

$0.10

input MTok, short prompts

128K

maximum output tokens

Short-prompt input price drops 10x

Input price per 1M tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens. One block equals $0.10.

$0.10Haiku 5.5

$1.00Haiku 4.5

Best fit: narrow work at scale

Run often: classification, extraction, routing, summaries.

Pair with: Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent.

Escalate: complex agentic coding still favors larger models.

What teams like

Lower latency and unit cost make repeated agent turns, CRM tasks, document Q&A and enterprise summaries easier to run at scale.

What needs care

Teams need fresh evals, token recounting, API migration work and fallbacks for sensitive classification paths.

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