Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5 with lower costs and faster speeds

Anthropic has introduced Claude Haiku 5.5, a new small AI model designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks. According to the company, it is the "cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we’ve ever released." The model is intended for quick and repetitive workloads, such as summaries, database queries, and classification requests, and can function as a subagent for coding tasks alongside larger models like Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5.

Pricing and Availability

Anthropic states that Claude Haiku 5.5 costs around 75% less to run on average compared to the previous version, Haiku 4.5. The company notes that for requests up to 100,000 tokens, the price is 90% lower than Haiku 4.5, while requests over 100,000 tokens are 50% lower. This calculation accounts for an updated tokenizer that uses slightly more tokens per task than the previous version.

The model is available now on all platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Alongside the launch, Anthropic is halving the price of cache reads for Claude Sonnet 5.5, reducing them from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens. The company says this change makes Sonnet 5.5 approximately 20% cheaper on most agentic work.

Performance Benchmarks

Anthropic reports that Claude Haiku 5.5 shows significant improvements over Haiku 4.5 across several benchmarks. In the OSWorld 2.1 computer use test (offline subset), Haiku 5.5 scored 72.4%, compared to 15.7% for Haiku 4.5. On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 agentic coding benchmark, Haiku 5.5 achieved 39.2%, while Haiku 4.5 scored 0.0%.

For multidisciplinary reasoning on Humanity’s Last Exam, Haiku 5.5 scored 45.9% without tools and 57.4% with tools, up from 10.2% and 18.7% respectively for Haiku 4.5. Anthropic notes that while Haiku 5.5 is faster and cheaper, larger models like Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain better choices for complex agentic coding tasks.

Customer Feedback

Several companies have provided early feedback on the new model. Aaron Vinh, Staff Software Engineer at Asana, stated, "We’re very impressed with Claude Haiku 5.5, particularly its speed. We ran it through our eval suite for AI Teammates, our AI agent product, covering use cases like triaging bugs, setting up projects, and searching large portfolios to surface high-risk or overdue work. Compared with the model we use today, we saw over a 30% reduction in latency for task completions and up to 2.5x faster inference per agent turn. It’s a noticeably snappier experience."

Ze’ev Klapow, Distinguished Software Engineer at HubSpot, reported that Haiku 5.5 achieved the best score they have seen on their CRM task suite, at 92.8% averaged over three runs. "One CRM audit task asks models to identify stale but ambiguous records. Across all of the models we tested, Haiku 5.5 was fastest to complete the task, and had the highest hit rate and the lowest false positive rate," Klapow said.

Daniel Campos, Distinguished Engineer at AlphaSense, noted that in a test of 400 queries, Haiku 5.5 showed a statistically significant improvement over Haiku 4.5, scoring 0.84 versus 0.76. Yashodha Bhavnani, VP of AI Products at Box, added that Haiku 5.5 scored 11 points higher than Haiku 4.5 at about half the latency in their early testing.

Safety and Updates

Anthropic states that Claude Haiku 5.5 shows major improvements in alignment evaluations relative to Haiku 4.5, with fewer instances of misaligned behavior. The model’s cybersecurity safeguards are more restrictive than Haiku 4.5’s but less restrictive than those applied to other recent models, permitting a wider range of defensive tasks while blocking penetration testing.

Additionally, Anthropic is introducing a new monthly API credit for Claude Max and Team subscribers. Max 5x users will receive $100 in credits per month, Max 20x users will get $200, and Team subscribers will receive up to $500, pooled across their users. These credits are designed to support users in building new agents and applications on the Claude Platform.

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Sources

• anthropic.com: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5 \ Anthropic

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.