Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 With 90% Price Cut and 1M-Token Context
Updated
Updated · KDnuggets · Oct 19
Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 With 90% Price Cut and 1M-Token Context
3 articles · Updated · KDnuggets · Oct 19
Summary
Claude Haiku 5.5, released Oct. 7, is priced at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, which Anthropic says makes it its cheapest and fastest small model.
The upgrade expands context to 1 million tokens from 200,000, doubles max output to 128,000, and adds adaptive thinking with an effort setting; Anthropic also reported large gains on its internal benchmarks versus Haiku 4.5.
Migration can break existing code: temperature, top_p, top_k, assistant prefills, and manual thinking budgets now error out, while replies may begin with thinking blocks and refusals must be handled explicitly.
Anthropic is pitching the model for high-volume tasks such as classification, extraction, summaries, database queries, and sub-agent workflows, with availability across its own platform, AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
Actual savings may be closer to 75% on average because the newer tokenizer counts roughly 30% more tokens, and larger Claude models still outperform Haiku 5.5 on more complex coding and agentic work.