Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's cheapest model yet, built for the jobs you'd never pay a senior rate for
By Brett Gavaghan, Founder of Adaptd ·
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 October. It costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 and is built for summaries, sorting and quick customer replies.
The short version
- Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's new small model, built for high-volume jobs like summaries, sorting requests and live customer support.
- Anthropic released it on 7 October 2026 on the Claude API, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
- If you run AI on lots of small, repeat jobs, ask your developer or tool provider to test it.
Not every job needs your most senior person, and not every AI task needs the most expensive model. Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's pick for the busywork.
What is Claude Haiku 5.5?
Claude Haiku 5.5 is the smallest and cheapest model in Anthropic's Claude 5.5 family, released on 7 October 2026.
Anthropic built it for high-volume, cost-sensitive work: summaries, sorting requests into categories, database queries and speed-sensitive jobs such as live customer support. It's the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, so you can trade cost against brainpower. HubSpot told Anthropic it was the best score it had seen from a smaller model on its CRM test tasks, at 92.8%.
What does it cost?
Claude Haiku 5.5 costs US$0.10 per million input tokens and US$0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, a tenth of Haiku 4.5's price.
Longer prompts cost more, so Anthropic puts the average saving at around 75% compared with Haiku 4.5. Anthropic also halved the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5. It still says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 are the better choice for complex work.
Should your business use it?
Businesses running AI on lots of small, repeat tasks should test Claude Haiku 5.5, because that's where the price cut adds up.
My advice: if you use a chatbot or tool built on Claude, ask the provider whether they're moving to Haiku 5.5 and whether the saving reaches you. If you have your own setup, run a week of real jobs through it next to your current model and compare the answers. Keep the bigger models for the tricky stuff. You wouldn't pay a senior accountant to sort the mail.
Wondering what this means for your business?
That's exactly what the discovery call is for.