Anthropic Unveils Claude Haiku 5.5 with Significant Cost Reductions

On October 7, Anthropic introduced Claude Haiku 5.5, a small AI model that aims to enhance efficiency and reduce costs for users. The new model is reported to operate at about 75% lower average costs than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5, making it a more economical choice for various applications.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume workloads, focusing on tasks such as summarization, database queries, classification, and live customer support. For prompts of up to 100,000 tokens, the cost is set at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens, significantly cheaper than the $1 and $5 rates for Haiku 4.5. For larger prompts, the pricing increases to $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens.

Anthropic noted that approximately 90% of requests to the previous Haiku model fell within the lower pricing tier. Additionally, Haiku 5.5 introduces an adjustable effort setting, allowing users to balance cost against reasoning capability. In evaluations, Haiku 5.5 demonstrated substantial improvements over its predecessor, scoring 72.4% on the OSWorld 2.1 test compared to 15.7% for Haiku 4.5.

Alongside the launch, Anthropic reduced the cache read price for Sonnet 5.5 to $0.10 per million tokens, estimating an overall cost reduction of around 20% for most agentic workloads. The company also announced monthly API credits for its Max and Team subscribers, with amounts varying based on subscription levels.

Haiku 5.5 is now available through the Claude Platform, as well as major cloud services like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The company is also adding beta support for computer and browser use in its development kits.