Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5: 75% Cheaper, Fastest Small Model Yet
Anthropic dropped its newest small model on Wednesday, and the pitch is simple: do 75 percent more for 75 percent less. Claude Haiku 5.5, released October 7, is the company’s cheapest, fastest small model to date. It undercuts both its predecessor and OpenAI’s budget rival on price while beating them on several benchmarks. “Claude Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks,” Anthropic said in the launch announcement. “It reliably handles quick and repetitive workloads like summaries, compactions, database queries, and classification requests. It pairs well with Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent on coding work. And, since it’s also our fastest model to date, it works especially well for speed-sensitive tasks like live customer support and browser use.” ...