Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5: Faster, Cheaper AI Model for Everyday Tasks

Anthropic has introduced Claude Haiku 5.5, the latest addition to its Claude 5.5 family of artificial intelligence models. The company describes it as its fastest, most affordable and most capable small model, designed for high-volume and cost-sensitive workloads. It can handle tasks such as summarisation, database queries, text classification and live customer support. Anthropic also says Haiku 5.5 works well for coding when paired with its Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 models. According to the company, the model delivers competitive results across several benchmarks, including knowledge work, computer use, agentic coding and visual reasoning. It also introduces an adjustable effort setting that allows users to balance response quality, intelligence and cost.

Pricing is a key feature of the new model. Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, compared with $1 and $5, respectively, for Haiku 4.5. This represents an approximately 90% reduction in the listed per-token rates, although the company describes the overall operating cost as around 75% lower. Anthropic also reports improvements in alignment and misuse safeguards compared with Haiku 4.5, while retaining restrictions for potentially harmful requests. The model is available through Anthropic’s Claude Platform and major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Its launch expands Anthropic’s product range as competition in the AI industry intensifies.