What Is Claude Haiku 5.5? Anthropic’s New Claude 5.5 Model, Availability and Pricing

The new Claude 5.5 model is Claude Haiku 5.5. Anthropic announced it on October 7, 2026, completing a three-model lineup that also includes Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. Haiku is designed for quick, high-volume work at a lower cost. It is available now, including through Anthropic’s developer platform and supported cloud platforms.

The launch confirms the model name, intended uses and pricing that had been the subject of reports about a third Claude 5.5 release. Reports have also placed Anthropic’s product launches in the context of a planned initial public offering. The Haiku announcement itself is a product launch, not an announcement of an IPO date or terms.

What changed in Claude 5.5?

Anthropic introduced Opus 5.5 on September 22 for demanding work that calls for more extensive judgment and reasoning. Sonnet 5.5 followed on September 28 as a faster, less costly option for everyday professional tasks, including fixing bugs and producing documents, slides and spreadsheets. Haiku 5.5 adds the smallest and least expensive option in the family.

Anthropic positions Haiku for tasks such as summarizing material, classifying requests, querying databases and carrying out focused steps within a larger coding workflow. Speed-sensitive applications, including customer support and browser use, are other intended uses. It is also the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, which lets developers make a trade-off between cost and capability for a task.

That does not make Haiku the best choice for every Claude job. Anthropic says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain better suited to complex, multi-step coding work. The practical distinction is whether an application needs many fast, narrowly defined responses or a more capable model for a difficult assignment.

Is Claude Haiku 5.5 available to use?

Yes. Anthropic says Haiku 5.5 is available across its platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Developers using the Claude Platform can select it with the model ID claude-haiku-5-5. Availability through a platform does not mean every user will see the same model choices or usage limits in a Claude app account; those depend on the product and plan.

How much does Haiku 5.5 cost?

Anthropic lists API prices of $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts of up to 100,000 tokens. For prompts over 100,000 tokens, the listed rates rise to $0.50 for input and $2.50 for output per million tokens. Cached-token rates are listed separately. These are developer usage prices, not a monthly Claude subscription price.

Anthropic estimates Haiku 5.5 costs about 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5. Actual spending will depend on prompt length, output length, caching and how often an application calls the model. Alongside the launch, Anthropic also cut Sonnet 5.5’s cache-read price from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens; that change applies to Sonnet, not just the new Haiku model.

How does Claude 5.5 compare with ChatGPT?

Claude is Anthropic’s AI assistant and model family; ChatGPT is OpenAI’s assistant. Haiku 5.5 is a specific model within Claude, so there is no single ChatGPT-versus-Haiku result that settles which assistant is better for everyone. Anthropic publishes evaluations comparing Haiku 5.5 with other models, but benchmark results depend on the task and testing setup.

For someone choosing a tool, the more useful comparison is the work at hand: whether responses are accurate enough, fast enough and affordable enough for that use. Haiku 5.5’s confirmed appeal is its position within Anthropic’s own lineup—a readily available, lower-cost option for frequent, focused tasks—while Sonnet and Opus serve more demanding work.