On Oct 7 Anthropic shipped Claude Haiku 5.5 (claude-haiku-5-5), completing the Claude 5.5 family. It targets high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summaries, compaction, classification and coding subagents, and Anthropic calls it its fastest model at standard speed. Prompts up to 100K cost $0.10 input / $0.50 output per million tokens, and it is the first Haiku with effort levels. It scores 72.4% on the OSWorld 2.1 offline subset (Haiku 4.5: 15.7%) and 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0. Sonnet 5.5 cache reads were cut 50% the same day, and Max/Team plans get monthly API credits.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Pricing: prompts up to 100K cost $0.10 input / $0.50 output / $0.01 cache reads per million tokens ($0.50 / $2.50 above 100K) vs $1 / $5 for Haiku 4.5; Anthropic says about 75% cheaper on average (announcement)
- ✓OSWorld 2.1 offline subset: 72.4% vs 15.7% (Haiku 4.5), 48.9% (GPT-6 Luna), 83.9% (Sonnet 5.5)
- ✓Terminal-Bench 4.0: 39.2% (Haiku 4.5 0.0%, GPT-6 Luna 16.4%); FrontierCode 1.1 Main: 46.4% (Sonnet 5.5 xhigh 52.1%)
- ✓First Haiku with low/medium/high/xhigh/max effort; Claude Code v2.1.293 makes it the default Haiku on the API with 1M context (release notes)
- ✓Same day: Sonnet 5.5 cache reads cut from $0.20 to $0.10/M (about 20% cheaper on most agentic work); Max 5x / 20x / Team get $100 / $200 / up to $500 in monthly API credits
Key Decision Metrics at a Glance
Heavy Claude Code use: compare subscription limits and API bills
Compare 40 dev plans & simulate token costs vs $20/mo subscriptions
Project Links & Resources
Direct AccessIn-Depth Technical Analysis
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7, 2026, completing the Claude 5.5 family after Opus 5.5 (Sep 22) and Sonnet 5.5 (Sep 28). It is aimed at high-volume, cost-sensitive work: summaries, context compaction, database queries, classification, and subagent tasks alongside Opus or Sonnet on coding. Anthropic calls it its fastest model at standard speed, which suits live customer support and browser use.
It is the first Haiku with adjustable effort (low, medium, high, xhigh, max) and adaptive thinking, and it uses the newer tokenizer shared with Sonnet and Opus 5.5. Claude Code v2.1.293 makes claude-haiku-5-5 the default Haiku on the Anthropic API with a 1M context window.
On Anthropic's published table it scores 72.4% on the OSWorld 2.1 offline subset (Haiku 4.5: 15.7%, GPT-6 Luna: 48.9%), 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Haiku 4.5: 0.0%), 46.4% on FrontierCode 1.1 Main, 45.9% / 57.4% on Humanity's Last Exam without / with tools, and 1620 on GDPval-AA v2.1. Anthropic still recommends Sonnet or Opus for complex agentic coding.
Pricing for prompts up to 100K tokens is $0.10 input, $0.50 output and $0.01 cache reads per million tokens ($0.50 / $2.50 above 100K), which Anthropic estimates at about 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 on average. It is available on the Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and on Vercel AI Gateway as anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. The same day, Sonnet 5.5 cache reads dropped 50% to $0.10/M, and Max 5x, Max 20x and Team subscribers get $100, $200 and up to $500 in monthly API credits.
Benchmark side-by-side against alternatives, or calculate monthly token cost vs subscription break-even.
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