Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 at 75% lower cost

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October 2026, the third model in its Claude 5.5 family in the past month, following Opus and Sonnet upgrades. The new model costs around 75% less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5, the version it replaces, and is priced at $0.10 per million input tokens for prompts under 100,000 tokens.9to5mac.com

The release matters because it expands Anthropic's lineup ahead of a planned initial public offering (IPO), and because Haiku is the smallest and cheapest of Anthropic's three main Claude models, sitting below Sonnet and Opus. Anthropic describes Haiku 5.5 as designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks, marking a step down in price for its most affordable tier.thenewstack.io+1

Third Claude 5.5 model in a month

Anthropic currently offers three main Claude models: Haiku, the smallest and cheapest; Sonnet, medium size and price; and Opus, the largest and most expensive. A fourth tier, Fable/Mythos, is even more capable and costly. Today's release upgrades Claude's Haiku model from version 4.5 to version 5.5, the third Claude 5.5 upgrade over the last month.

Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 reliably handles quick and repetitive workloads such as summaries, compactions, database queries, and classification requests. It pairs with Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent on coding work, and being Anthropic's fastest model to date, it suits speed-sensitive tasks like live customer support and browser use.

Pricing and safeguards detailed

Haiku 5.5 is built for classification, summarization and extraction, including live support, voice agents and in-app assistants. It costs 75 per cent less than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5. For prompts under 100,000 tokens it is priced at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, rising to $0.50 and $2.50 for longer prompts.

Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 is its first Haiku with built-in safeguards for a narrow set of high-risk cybersecurity requests, and added that most everyday tasks would not be impacted. On its website, Anthropic compares Claude Haiku 5.5 to OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Luna, another low-cost model. Alongside the launch, Anthropic is halving the price of Claude Sonnet 5.5's cache reads, which means Sonnet 5.5 now runs around 20% cheaper on most agentic work. The company is also introducing a new monthly API credit for Claude Max and Team subscribers, designed to support users building new agents and applications on the Claude Platform. The launch arrives about a year after the previous Haiku model upgrade, and follows Anthropic's upgrades to its computer use feature on Mac and its merging of Claude Cowork with chat. Anthropic's lineup now spans four tiers, with Haiku positioned as the entry-level model for cost-sensitive, high-volume workloads.