Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 — its cheapest, fastest small model, around 75% cheaper to run than Haiku 4.5 by its own math, priced at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens under 100k — with Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved and monthly API credits announced for Max and Team

“Anthropic's new Haiku 5.5 costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 by Anthropic's own math — and it's positioned as the cheap subagent that does the repetitive work while Opus and Sonnet plan.”

Usable claims

• On October 7, 2026 (Wednesday, calendar-verified), Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 5.5: "the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we've ever released." Per the announcement: "Claude Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks. It reliably handles quick and repetitive workloads (like summaries, compactions, database queries, and classification requests). It pairs well with Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent on coding work. And, since it's also our fastest model to date, it works especially well for speed-sensitive tasks like live customer support and browser use." The fastest-model claim carries Anthropic's own footnote: "Claude Haiku 5.5 is our fastest model to date at each model's standard speed, although it runs less quickly than our Opus models in Fast Mode." Pricing, per the announcement: "Haiku 5.5 is available at a much lower price than Haiku 4.5. On average, it now costs around 75% less to run." The footnote scopes that average: "Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests up to 100,000 tokens, and 50% lower for requests over 100,000 tokens. On Haiku 4.5, 90% of requests fell into the former category. This calculation also accounts for changes between Haiku 4.5 and Haiku 5.5 in how many tokens are used to complete a given piece of work: Haiku 5.5 has an updated tokenizer (similar to Sonnet 5.5's and Opus 5.5's), which means it uses slightly more tokens per task." Per the pricing table, Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 input / $0.50 output per million tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens ($0.50 / $2.50 over 100k), with cache reads at $0.01 / $0.05. Per the announcement: "Haiku 5.5 is especially good value when used for tasks with prompts up to 100,000 tokens, which make up around 90% of requests to our previous Haiku model." Haiku 5.5 is "our first Haiku-class model to come with an adjustable effort setting", per the announcement, which adds that "users can decide whether to optimize for cost or intelligence". On benchmarks reported by Anthropic: OSWorld 2.1 (offline subset) 72.4% versus Haiku 4.5's 15.7%; Humanity's Last Exam 45.9% without tools versus Haiku 4.5's 10.2%; Terminal-Bench 4.0 39.2% versus Sonnet 5.5's 70.6% — and the announcement itself places the model: "Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain better choices for complex agentic coding tasks like those measured by Terminal-Bench 4.0. By contrast, Haiku 5.5 is best suited to more narrowly scoped tasks that might otherwise have been cost-prohibitive with previous versions of Claude—like compaction, summarization, or subagent work." On safety, per the announcement, Haiku 5.5's cybersecurity safeguards are "more restrictive than Haiku 4.5's, but somewhat less restrictive than those we've applied to other recent models", permitting "a wider range of defensive tasks than our safeguards for Sonnet 5.5" while they "still block penetration testing and other techniques more likely to be used by attackers". Availability, per the announcement: "Claude Haiku 5.5 is available now on all platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure." And per the announcement: "For developers, we're also updating our Claude Python and TypeScript SDKs to add support for computer use and browser use in beta." Alongside the model, Anthropic announced: "First, starting today, we're lowering the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5. Cache reads now cost 50% less: $0.10 per million tokens rather than $0.20." — which Anthropic says "reduces the cost of Sonnet 5.5 on most agentic tasks by around 20%". And: "Second, this week, we'll roll out a new monthly API credit to all Max and Team subscribers for use on the Claude Platform. Max 5x users will get $100 in credits per month, Max 20x users will get $200, and Team subscribers will receive up to $500, pooled across their users." — credits usable "on any of our models". Per Simon Willison (posting October 7): "The new Haiku exactly matches the price of GPT-6 Luna—$0.10/$0.50—up to 100,000 tokens." Willison also measured: "My Claude Token Counter tool shows that the same long prompt uses around 1.25x as many tokens with Haiku 5.5 compared to Haiku 4.5, so there's a hidden price increase there." On the credits, per Willison: "The API credits exactly match the cost of the subscription itself. This is really generous—it makes it much easier for subscribers to use the API." And: "Note that the monthly credits do not roll over—use them or lose them." Customer-reported results relayed on Anthropic's page: Asana (Aaron Vinh) saw "over a 30% reduction in latency for task completions and up to 2.5x faster inference per agent turn"; HubSpot (Ze'ev Klapow) reported "92.8% averaged over three runs" on its CRM suite; AlphaSense (Daniel Campos) runs "Ask in Document" at "about 8M calls a week in production" and measured "0.84 vs. 0.76" against Haiku 4.5; Cognition (Walden Yan) reports "a top-tier FrontierCode score of 66.2" with Haiku 5.5 as the sidekick in Devin Fusion.