Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October, calling it the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model it has released. It costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, rising to $0.50 and $2.50 above that. Anthropic says it costs about 75% less on average to run than Haiku 4.5, and it is the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting.
Anthropic aims it at high-volume work such as summaries, classification and database queries, and at running as a subagent next to its larger models. On the offline subset of OSWorld 2.1 it scores 72.4%, against 15.7% for Haiku 4.5; on Terminal-Bench 4.0 it scores 39.2%, against 70.6% for Sonnet 5.5, which Anthropic still recommends for complex agentic coding. It is available through the Claude Platform API and on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
At $0.10 per million input tokens, a capable small model makes it cheap to put a model on every routing and classification step of an agent. Cheap steps multiply, so check how often its answers are right at the confidence you act on before you let it decide alone.
Drafted with AI from the original source, then checked and edited by Sridhar Mukkandi. Spotted a mistake? Write to hello@tarkika.com and we'll correct it here.