Anthropic reveals Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest small model yet

Published Oct 7, 2026, 5:08 PM EDT Simon is a Computer Science BSc graduate who has been writing about technology since 2014, and using Windows machines since 3.1. After working for an indie game studio and acting as the family's go-to technician for all computer issues, he found his passion for writing and decided to use his skill set to write about all things tech. Since beginning his writing career, he has written for many different publications such as WorldStart, Listverse, and MakeTechEasier. However, after finding his home at MakeUseOf in February 2019, he would eventually move on to its sister site, XDA, to bring the latest and greatest in Windows, Linux, and DIY electronics. Sign in to your XDA account Summary Claude Haiku 5.5 launches across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure — the fastest light model yet. Big performance gains vs. Haiku 4.4/4.5 in knowledge work, PC tasks, visual reasoning, and coding. Much cheaper per million tokens — huge cuts for cache reads/writes, input and output costs. Anthropic has been moving pretty quickly lately. Only yesterday did it announce a Google Workspace plugin that lets you invoke Claude in a sidebar to help you get your work done. Now, the company has announced that it's releasing the cheapest, fastest light model yet with Claude Haiku 5.5. Claude Haiku 5.5 makes the LLM cheaper and faster than ever It's showing some impressive numbers over Haiku 4.4 Credit: Claude As announced on the Anthropic blog, Claude Haiku 5.5 has arrived on all platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The most notable immediate improvement with Haiku 5.5 over its predecessor is its performance. Check out the table above from the Anthropic blog; we're seeing huge gains in knowledge work, PC use, and visual reasoning. Plus, Haiku 5.5 actually has a performance rating for agentic coding now, something 4.5 can't say the same for. The second benefit to Haiku 5.5 is the price. Anthropic posted a table showing off the costs, with Haiku 5.5 on the left being compared to Haiku 4.5 and Sonnet 5.5: Price per 1 million tokens Haiku 5.5 prompts up to / over 100k Haiku 4.5 Sonnet 5.5 Cache reads $0.01 / $0.05 $0.10 $0.10 Cache writes $0.125 / $0.625 $1.25 $2.50 Input tokens $0.10 / $0.50 $1.00 $2.00 Output tokens $0.50 / $2.50 $5.00 $10.00 As such, Claude Haiku 5.5 seems to be a winner both in terms of performance and in cost. I can't imagine people finding a reason to continue using Haiku 4.5 if a budget-friendly LLM is their main interest. However, as is the case with all of these announcements, we'll have to see how Haiku 5.5 actually performs in real life before declaring it a powerhouse for its weight bracket.