Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5

Background

Haiku is the smallest of the three tiers in Anthropic's Claude naming, and the one that Anthropic has positioned for lower cost. Earlier Haiku releases, such as Haiku 4.5, are the reference point for the cost comparison Anthropic made when it introduced the new model. Claude Haiku 5.5 is the third model in the Claude 5.5 family, after Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5.

What happened

On 7 October 2026 Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, the third model of the Claude 5.5 family.^[1] The same day, Anthropic cut the cache-read price of Sonnet 5.5 by 50%.^[1] A cache read is a charge for reusing part of a prompt the model has already processed, instead of processing it again, so a lower cache-read price makes repeated work cheaper. The release also came with changes for subscribers, described below.

Key details

The first detail is price. Haiku 5.5 starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, for prompts of up to 100K tokens.^[1] A token is the unit of text a model reads and writes, and a price per million tokens lets a developer estimate the cost of a batch of work.

The second detail is cost. Anthropic said that Haiku 5.5 costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average.^[1] This is an average across Anthropic's own measurements, not a guarantee for every workload.

The third detail is control. Haiku 5.5 was the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting.^[1] Effort controls how much work the model puts into each answer. A smaller model with a setting like this lets a user choose between speed and thoroughness for each task, instead of accepting one fixed behaviour.

The fourth detail is for subscribers. Max, Ultra and Team subscribers began receiving monthly API credits of $100, $200 and up to $500 respectively.^[1] API credits are amounts of usage that can be spent on the developer interface, separate from the chat apps.

Impact

Haiku 5.5 extends the Claude 5.5 family to the lower-cost tier, with the price cut on Sonnet 5.5 arriving at the same time. For developers the practical question is how much a given job costs and how quickly it runs. Anthropic's figures answer that question with a price, a cost comparison and a choice of effort, while the monthly credits for subscribers change what a plan includes for developer use.^[1]