Breaking

Anthropic Releases Claude Haiku 5.5 as a Lower-Cost Model for High-Volume AI Work

October 8, 2026 at 16:23 EDT

Foundation Models
AI Agents
Software Dev & Coding

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, positioning the smallest model in its Claude 5.5 family as a faster, cheaper engine for high-volume AI products and agent systems. The release gives developers a new low-cost option for routing, extraction, summarization, compaction and subagent work, while reserving larger Claude models for harder planning and reasoning tasks.

Oct. 7, 2026 · Anthropic

Claude Haiku 5.5 targets the cost of everyday AI work

The new Haiku-class model starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and is designed to handle the repeated calls inside agents, routing, extraction and summaries.

$0.10

input per MTok, up to 100K prompts

90%

lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 in the lower tier

token context window

128K

maximum output tokens

Input price comparison

$0.10

Haiku 5.5

$1.00

Haiku 4.5

$2.00

Sonnet 5.5

Each stack compares input cost per million tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens.

Plan

A larger Claude model handles the harder decision.

Delegate

Haiku 5.5 takes repeated narrow subagent calls.

Scale

Summaries, routing and extraction run at volume.

Watch

Long prompts enter a higher price tier.

Where it fits

Developers are using the model for quick lookups, summaries, document extraction, routing and parallel subagents.

Where it stops

Complex coding work still favors Sonnet 5.5 or Opus 5.5, and safeguards restrict higher-risk cyber requests.

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