TL;DR
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026. It is their cheapest, fastest small model, and on average it costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5. Use it for the busy work like summaries and sorting, and keep Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 for the hard planning and coding. Max and Team plans also get a monthly API credit to build with.
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What Claude Haiku 5.5 is and why it matters
Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's newest small model. Anthropic calls it their cheapest, fastest and most capable small model yet. On average it costs around 75% less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5. The model ID is claude-haiku-5-5.
What Claude Haiku 5.5 is good at
Anthropic built Claude Haiku 5.5 for high-volume, cost-sensitive work. That means quick, repeated jobs like summaries, compactions, database queries and sorting requests into groups. It is also their fastest model, so it fits jobs where speed matters, like live customer support.
A real speed test: Asana ran Haiku 5.5 through its tests for AI Teammates, its AI agent product. Compared with the model they use today, Asana saw over a 30% drop in latency and up to 2.5x faster inference per agent turn.
Where Claude Haiku 5.5 is the wrong pick
Cheap does not mean it replaces your biggest model. Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 are still the better choices for complex coding agents. Haiku 5.5 is best for narrower jobs that used to cost too much.
Split your work between Opus and Haiku
The simple plan: let Opus 5.5 plan the work, and hand the repeated busy work to Haiku 5.5. Anthropic says Haiku pairs well with Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent on coding work.
Best practices for Claude Haiku 5.5:
- Give Haiku one narrow job. One summary, one lookup or one sort per request.
- Keep prompts under 100,000 tokens. Anthropic says that is where Haiku 5.5 is especially good value, and it covers about 90% of requests to the old Haiku.
- Keep hard planning on Opus 5.5. Let the biggest model decide the steps, then hand the repeated steps to Haiku.
- Test one task first. Run the same task on both models and compare the answers before you switch the whole app.
Prompts to try with Claude Haiku 5.5:
promptLook at my project and list every step that is repeated busy work, like summarizing, looking something up or sorting. Tell me which of those steps could run on Claude Haiku 5.5 (model ID claude-haiku-5-5) instead of my biggest model.promptChange my app so Claude Opus 5.5 plans the work and hands each small repeated task to a Haiku 5.5 subagent. Show me the change before you make it.Use your monthly API credit to build
Anthropic is rolling out a monthly API credit this week for Max and Team subscribers. It is for building agents and apps on the Claude Platform. Max 5x users get $100 a month in credits and Max 20x users get $200.
- On a Max or Team plan: check your account for the new credit, then build a small Haiku 5.5 app with it.
- Not on a paid plan: try the two prompts above on a small project first, and compare cost and speed.
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Common questions
How much cheaper is Claude Haiku 5.5?
Anthropic says it costs around 75% less to run than Claude Haiku 4.5, on average.
What is Claude Haiku 5.5 best for?
High-volume, cost-sensitive work like summaries, compactions, database queries and classification requests. It is also Anthropic's fastest model.
Should I use Haiku 5.5 instead of Opus 5.5?
Not for everything. Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 are still better for complex coding agents. Use Haiku for narrow, repeated jobs and let Opus plan.
What is the new monthly API credit?
Anthropic is rolling out a monthly API credit this week to Max and Team subscribers for building on the Claude Platform. Max 5x users get $100 a month and Max 20x users get $200.
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