Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 with lower API costs and faster performance
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October 2026, introducing a new small AI model designed for high-volume and cost-sensitive workloads. The company says the model is its fastest Haiku release to date and is intended for tasks such as summarisation, database queries, classification, live customer support and browser-based work.
According to Anthropic, Claude Haiku 5.5 costs around 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5 when differences in pricing and token usage are taken into account.
Claude Haiku 5.5 pricing and availability
For prompts of up to 100,000 tokens, Anthropic lists the API price at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. For prompts above 100,000 tokens, the listed rates are $0.50 for input and $2.50 for output.
The company also introduced an adjustable effort setting for the Haiku line for the first time. This allows developers to choose between lower computational cost and greater model capability depending on the task.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is available immediately through Anthropic’s own platform as well as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Anthropic also announced updated Python and TypeScript software development kits with beta support for computer-use and browser-use functions.
Alongside the Haiku launch, Anthropic reduced Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache-read pricing by 50%, from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens.
