Claude Haiku 5.5 is here: The fastest, most affordable Anthropic model yet

Anthropic might have once wondered whether it should slow down AI development, but the company has since only become more aggressive. It released the new Opus 5.5 model last month, followed by the slightly more economical Sonnet 5.5 nearly a week ago. Now, it’s back with an even faster and more affordable model.

Anthropic today announced the new Claude Haiku 5.5 model, positioning it as the model of choice for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks. Haiku 5.5 outperforms its predecessor, Haiku 4.5, by a noticeable margin. It approaches the benchmark numbers achieved by the considerably more expensive Sonnet 5.5 and beats the recently released GPT-6 Luna across all benchmarks shared by Anthropic.

The company says Haiku 5.5 pairs well with Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 for agentic coding tasks and is well-suited for speed-sensitive workflows like live customer support and browser use.

More importantly, Haiku 5.5 is cheaper than Haiku 4.5 by nearly 75% on average. The model costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. By contrast, Haiku 4.5 costs $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is also the first Haiku model to support adjustable effort settings. Users can choose to run Haiku 5.5 on Low, Medium, High, Xhigh, or Max settings depending on the task. Higher effort settings will naturally result in more intelligent responses, but will also be more costly to run.

The new Haiku 5.5 model is already available across all platforms that offer access to Anthropic models, including the Claude Platform, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.