Claude Haiku 5.5

Claude Haiku 5.5 (7 October 2026) is Anthropic's small, fast model — which Anthropic calls the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model it has released. For prompts up to 100,000 tokens it costs 90% less than Haiku 4.5.

Best for

• Summaries, classification and data extraction at high volume
• Sub-agents working under a larger Sonnet or Opus model
• Real-time customer support and chat
• Context compaction for long-running agents

How it compares — and the India angle

• $0.10 in / $0.50 out per million tokens for prompts up to 100K — a tenth of Haiku 4.5's $1/$5. Above 100K tokens the price is five times higher ($0.50/$2.50), so keep prompts short to stay on the cheap rate.
• It is the first Haiku with an adjustable effort setting: turn it down for simple routing, up for harder extraction.
• Anthropic's own OSWorld 2.1 result jumped from 15.7% (Haiku 4.5) to 72.4% — but Anthropic still recommends Sonnet 5.5 or Opus 5.5 for complex agentic coding.
• For Indian startups watching unit economics, this is the model that makes a free tier affordable.