Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, with prices cut by up to 90% from the previous version.
What changed
Claude Haiku 5.5 now costs 10 cents per million input tokens and 50 cents per million output tokens for requests under 100,000 tokens — that covers about 90% of typical use. The previous version, Haiku 4.5, cost $1 input and $5 output. For requests over 100,000 tokens, the new price is 50 cents input and $2.50 output, a 50% cut. Anthropic says the average savings across real workloads is about 75%.
Haiku is Anthropic's smallest, fastest model. It's meant for high-volume routine work: sorting customer messages, categorizing support tickets, extracting data from invoices, drafting standard replies. The new version also extends the context window from 200,000 to 1 million tokens, so it can handle longer documents in a single request.
What you can do with it this week
If you're already using Claude Sonnet (the larger model) for routine batch work — tagging emails, summarizing feedback, routing requests — switch that work to Haiku and compare the results. The quality gap has narrowed: on coding benchmarks, Haiku 5.5 scores 72.4% on OSWorld, up from 15.7% on the previous version.
Set up a small test: take 20 real examples of a recurring task, run them through Haiku 5.5, and count how many results you'd accept without editing. If it's 18 or more, move that task to Haiku permanently and keep Sonnet for the work that genuinely needs deeper reasoning. Anthropic also added monthly API credits to Max and Team plans, so if you're on those plans, the switch costs you nothing extra to try.
What to keep in your own hands
Cheaper AI tempts you to process more without checking more. Don't. The error rate on a $0.10 task is the same as the error rate on a $1 task — the model doesn't know what you paid. Keep your review process: if you were checking every tenth result before, keep checking every tenth result now.
Watch your total spend, not just the per-task price. At 75% off, it's easy to run ten times the volume and end up paying more. Set a monthly budget cap and stick to it. And remember: Haiku's strength is routine, high-volume work with clear patterns. If a task needs judgment, creativity, or understanding of context you haven't spelled out, Haiku will give you a cheaper wrong answer, not a better one.