Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5, says it is 75% cheaper than previous model

Anthropic has a new Claude model, and this one is not trying to be the biggest or most powerful AI model in the room. Instead, Claude Haiku 5.5 is designed to be fast, affordable and good at handling the kind of repetitive tasks that AI systems deal with every day.Think of things like summarising documents, classifying information, running database queries or handling customer support requests. These may not sound like the most exciting AI tasks, but they can quickly add up when businesses run them thousands or even millions of times.What Claude Haiku 5.5 brings to the tableAnthropic says Haiku 5.5 is its fastest model yet. That makes it particularly useful for applications where waiting for an answer is not really an option, such as live customer support and browser-based AI tools.The model can also work alongside Anthropic's larger Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 models. For coding, for example, Haiku 5.5 can act as a subagent and take care of smaller or repetitive jobs while a more capable model handles the bigger task. There is also a new feature that could make Haiku 5.5 more flexible. It is the first Haiku model to get an adjustable effort setting. Developers can choose whether they want the model to spend more resources on intelligence or keep things faster and cheaper, depending on the task.Anthropic also says Haiku 5.5 shows improvements in its alignment tests compared with Haiku 4.5, with fewer instances of misaligned behaviour and less willingness to cooperate with misuse.Claude Haiku 5.5 price and availability The biggest change, however, could be the price. Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 costs around 75 per cent less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average. That makes the new model particularly interesting for companies running high-volume AI workloads, where even small differences in cost can become significant.Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 is especially cost-effective for prompts of up to 100,000 tokens, which accounted for around 90 per cent of requests to its previous Haiku model.The company is also cutting the price of cache reads for Claude Sonnet 5.5 by half, from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens. Anthropic says this could make Sonnet 5.5 around 20 per cent cheaper for most agentic tasks. Claude Haiku 5.5 is available now across Anthropic's platforms, as well as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.- Ends