Anthropic lowers small-model API prices with Haiku release

Anthropic announced Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, targeting high-volume tasks including summarisation, context compaction, database queries, classification and subagents. It is the first Haiku model with adjustable reasoning effort.

The new control lets developers vary how much processing the model devotes to a task, adding another way to balance capability and cost.

Anthropic lists the model as claude-haiku-5-5 through its API, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

For contexts up to 100,000 tokens, Haiku 5.5 costs US$0.10 per million input tokens and US$0.50 per million output tokens. Cache reads cost US$0.01 and cache writes US$0.125 per million tokens. Above the context threshold, the corresponding rates are US$0.50, US$2.50, US$0.05 and US$0.625.

Haiku 4.5’s listed rates were US$1 for input, US$5 for output, US$0.10 for cache reads and US$1.25 for cache writes. The new rates represent nominal unit-price cuts of 90 per cent below the threshold and 50 per cent above it.

The new tokenizer complicates the comparison because the same work can produce more tokens. Anthropic estimates average cost roughly 75 per cent lower after accounting for tokenisation, and says about 90 per cent of earlier requests fell below the context threshold. A customer’s actual bill still depends on context size, generated output, cache use and effort settings.

Sonnet 5.5’s cache-read rate also falls from US$0.20 to US$0.10 per million tokens. Anthropic estimates a saving of about 20 per cent for a typical agentic workflow. The announcement describes monthly extra-usage credits of up to US$100 for Max 5x, US$200 for Max 20x and a shared pool of up to US$500 for Teams, subject to rollout and eligibility conditions.

Anthropic reports an offline OSWorld score of 72.4 for Haiku 5.5, against 15.7 for Haiku 4.5. Its Terminal-Bench 4.0 result is 39.2, compared with 70.6 for Sonnet 5.5. Humanity’s Last Exam scores are 45.9 without tools and 57.4 with tools.

The evaluations cover different tasks and configurations, including computer use, terminal work and examinations with and without tools.

In its safety assessment, Anthropic places Haiku 5.5’s cybersecurity capability above Haiku 4.5 and below Sonnet 5.5. It puts biology capability at a level similar to Sonnet 5, Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.