Anthropic has introduced Claude Haiku 5.5, which it describes as its cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model to date. The company positions the release for high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads such as summaries, compactions, database queries, and classification requests, and says it pairs well with Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent on coding work.
According to Anthropic, Haiku 5.5 is its fastest model so far at each model's standard speed, making it suited to speed-sensitive tasks like live customer support and browser use. The company says it now costs around 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5, with pricing 90% lower for requests up to 100,000 tokens and 50% lower for requests above that threshold. Anthropic notes that Haiku 5.5 uses an updated tokenizer, which means it consumes slightly more tokens per task, and that about 90% of requests to the previous Haiku model fell under the 100,000-token mark.
Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort setting, letting users choose whether to optimize for cost or intelligence. The company says it shows major improvements across almost all alignment evaluations relative to Haiku 4.5, with fewer instances of misaligned behavior and lower willingness to cooperate with misuse. Its cybersecurity safeguards are described as more restrictive than Haiku 4.5's but somewhat less restrictive than those applied to other recent models, permitting a wider range of defensive tasks than Sonnet 5.5's safeguards while still blocking penetration testing and techniques more likely to be used by attackers. Biology safeguards match those of Sonnet 5, Sonnet 5.5, and Opus 5.
Anthropic also announced broader changes to its model range. Starting today, cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 cost 50% less — $0.10 per million tokens rather than $0.20 — which the company says reduces the cost of Sonnet 5.5 on most agentic tasks by around 20%. In addition, this week Anthropic will roll out a monthly API credit for Max and Team subscribers: Max 5x users receive $100 per month, Max 20x users $200, and Team subscribers up to $500 pooled across their users. The credits can be used on any Anthropic model.
For developers, Anthropic is updating its Claude Python and TypeScript SDKs to add beta support for computer use and browser use. Claude Haiku 5.5 is available now on all platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, with the model identifier claude-haiku-5-5 on the Claude Platform.