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Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 With Lower Prices for High-Volume Agents

October 7, 2026 at 15:33 EDT

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Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, positioning the small model as a cheaper subagent for high-volume Claude deployments. The company says the model costs around 75% less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5 on average, with the steepest savings on prompts up to 100,000 tokens.

Oct. 7, 2026 · Anthropic

Claude Haiku 5.5 lowers the cost of small-agent work

Anthropic's new Haiku model targets high-volume agents, with an average run-cost reduction of around 75% versus Haiku 4.5 and a lower tier for prompts up to 100K tokens.

~75%

lower average run cost than Haiku 4.5

token context window

128K

maximum output tokens

90%

of prior Haiku requests were under 100K tokens

Input price up to 100K tokens

Each block equals $0.10 per million input tokens.

Haiku 4.5

$1.00/MTok

Haiku 5.5

$0.10/MTok

The short-prompt tier is one tenth of Haiku 4.5's input price.

How Anthropic frames the role

Plan with a larger model

→

Dispatch Haiku subagents

→

Summarize, route, compact

What it unlocks

Lower-cost loops for summaries, lookups, context compaction, routing, and parallel subagent work.

What to watch

Long sessions move into a higher pricing tier, and the newer tokenizer makes budgets worth recalculating.

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