Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 for cheap, fast AI tasks

Anthropic has launched Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model aimed at work where latency and cost matter more than maximum reasoning depth.

The company says Haiku 5.5 is its fastest Claude model so far and its cheapest small model. It is designed for high-volume tasks such as summaries, compactions, database queries, classification, browser use and live support. Anthropic also frames it as a useful subagent alongside Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 for coding workflows.

The pricing shift is the main practical point. Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average. For prompts up to 100,000 tokens, input is priced at $0.10 per million tokens and output at $0.50 per million tokens. The model also gets adjustable effort settings, letting developers trade cost for more capability.

Alongside the launch, Anthropic is cutting Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache-read pricing by 50%, which it says can reduce the cost of many agentic workloads by around 20%.

Haiku 5.5 is available in Claude, the Claude Platform, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.