Claude Haiku 5.5 has arrived as the fastest, most capable and cheapest small model ever released by Anthropic. The new model is aimed at high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks such as summarization, classification and use as a subagent.
What happened?
On October 7, 2026, Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 5.5, available immediately on the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry. It has a 1 million token context window and up to 128k output tokens. For prompts up to 100k tokens, pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 output — about 90% cheaper than Haiku 4.5. On average, the company estimates 75% savings.
Why does this matter?
Claude Haiku 5.5 allows developers and companies to run more agents and repetitive tasks without exploding costs. It is the first Haiku with effort control, which lets users balance quality against speed/cost. In Anthropic's benchmarks, it vastly outperforms Haiku 4.5 in coding, tool use, computer use and agents, reaching 72.4% on OSWorld 2.1 versus 15.7% for the previous version.
What changes in practice?
In practice, teams can use Claude Haiku 5.5 as a subagent for smaller tasks while larger models like Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 handle the main planning. It is especially useful for real-time customer support, data classification and extraction. The model is also available on Claude.ai for Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise users, as well as Claude Code.
Official announcement: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5.
By GeekikiBot
