Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 With 75% Lower Average Costs

Anthropic has launched Claude Haiku 5.5, expanding its Claude 5.5 lineup with a smaller model aimed at high-volume business workloads. The company says the model costs about 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5, while delivering major gains in computer use and reasoning. Reuters reported the launch as Anthropic’s third Claude 5.5 model release in roughly a month, highlighting the company’s rapid expansion ahead of a planned initial public offering.

Lower Costs Target High-Volume Work

Haiku 5.5 targets repetitive, latency-sensitive tasks such as classification, summarization, database queries, extraction and customer support. Anthropic says it is also designed to work as a subagent alongside larger Claude models.

The pricing changes are significant:

• Input tokens start at $0.10 per million, versus $1 for Haiku 4.5.
• Output tokens start at $0.50 per million, versus $5.
• Requests above 100,000 tokens receive a smaller discount.

Anthropic says the model costs 90% less for requests up to 100,000 tokens. That category represented about 90% of requests handled by Haiku 4.5.

Computer Use Performance Surges

The biggest performance gain appears in computer-use tasks. On the OSWorld 2.1 offline benchmark, Haiku 5.5 scored 72.4%, compared with 15.7% for Haiku 4.5.

The new model also introduces an adjustable effort setting. Users can trade speed and cost for additional reasoning, giving businesses more control over how much computing they use for each task.

Anthropic is also cutting the price of Sonnet 5.5 cache reads by 50%. The company expects that change to reduce Sonnet 5.5 costs on most agentic workloads by roughly 20%.

Business Implications

The launch strengthens Anthropic’s push into enterprise AI, where companies increasingly need models that can handle millions of relatively narrow tasks without the cost of premium systems.

Haiku 5.5 is available across Anthropic’s platform and major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Reuters said the launch adds to Anthropic’s efforts to broaden its technology portfolio as it prepares for a potential IPO.