New models· 1 min read
Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model
The new small model is built for high-volume work and AI agents, and Anthropic says it costs about 75% less on average than Haiku 4.5.
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026. It is the company's small, fast model, designed for high-volume jobs such as summarizing, classifying text, answering customers in real time and working as a helper (a subagent) for larger models.
What's new
- Much cheaper: Anthropic says it costs around 75% less than Haiku 4.5 on average. Input starts at $0.10 per million tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens.
- A big jump in skill: on the benchmarks Anthropic reports, it scores far higher than Haiku 4.5 on computer-use and coding-agent tests.
- Adjustable effort: it is the first Haiku model where developers can choose how hard it thinks, trading cost for intelligence.
Why it matters
Agents call a model many times for every task. Cheap but capable small models make it practical to run agents at scale, for example with a large model planning while small subagents do the reading and summarizing. See how that works in our lesson on context engineering.
Read the original at Anthropic
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