Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 as Faster, Cheaper Model for High-Volume AI Tasks

Anthropic on Thursday announced Claude Haiku 5.5 as its fastest model to date. The company says it is aimed at developers running high-volume and cost-sensitive AI workloads. Claude Haiku 5.5 can be used for repetitive tasks such as summarisation, classification, database queries, and context compaction. It also targets browser-based applications and subagent coding work. Anthropic says it costs around 75 percent less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5, while also being the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting.

Claude Haiku 5.5 Price

The pricing for Haiku 5.5 is aimed at prompts of up to 100,000 tokens. This, as per Anthropic, accounted for around 90 percent of requests to its previous Haiku model. For prompts up to 100,000 tokens, input tokens cost $0.10 (roughly Rs. 9.67) per million tokens, while output tokens cost $0.50 (roughly Rs. 48.38) per million tokens. Cache reads cost $0.01 (roughly Rs. 0.96) per million tokens and cache writes cost $0.125 (roughly Rs. 12.57) per million tokens.

If the prompts rise above 100,000 tokens, the prices will rise to $0.50 (roughly Rs. 48.38) per million input tokens, $2.50 (roughly Rs. 241) per million output tokens, $0.05 (roughly Rs. 4.83) per million cache reads, and $0.625 (roughly Rs. 60.95) per million cache writes.

Claude Haiku 5.5 Features

Due to its relatively low cost compared to Haiku 4.5, Anthropic claims it is designed for tasks where speed and operating cost are more important than the maximum capabilities of Anthropic's larger models. In addition to its standalone capabilities, Haiku 5.5 can also be used as a subagent for coding tasks alongside Claude Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5.

Anthropic says its latest model targets speed-sensitive applications like live customer support and browser use. Among the most notable features is an adjustable effort setting — a first for a Haiku-class model. As per the company, this setting allows users to decide if a particular workload should prioritise cost or intelligence.

For developer use, Anthropic will be updating its Claude Python and TypeScript SDKs with beta support for computer use and browser use. It is said to be better suited to such applications due to its combination of speed, capability, and lower operating cost.

On the safety front, Anthropic claims that Haiku 5.5 shows improvements across almost all of its alignment evaluations compared with Haiku 4.5. It is also said to be less willing to cooperate with misuse.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is available across Anthropic's platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Developers can also access it through the Claude Platform using the claude-haiku-5-5 model.