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Models · Anthropic · 7 Oct 2026

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small, low-cost model for high-volume jobs such as summaries, classification and database queries.

Related party This item is about Anthropic, which makes Claude, the AI that drafts theTN.ai.

For prompts up to 100,000 tokens it costs USD 0.10 per million input tokens and USD 0.50 per million output tokens. Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 on average.

What Anthropic released

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on 7 Oct 2026. Reuters reports that it is the third model in the Claude 5.5 family in a month. It replaces Haiku 4.5 as the company's small, fast tier. Anthropic aims it at classification, summaries and extraction, including live support, voice agents and in-app assistants.

It is the first Haiku model with built-in safeguards for a narrow set of high-risk cybersecurity requests. Anthropic said most everyday tasks would not be affected. ComputingForGeeks reports that these filters still block penetration testing, and that the model over-refused more than any other model in Anthropic's automated behaviour audit.

Price and size

For prompts up to 100,000 tokens it costs USD 0.10 per million input tokens and USD 0.50 per million output tokens. Above that, it costs USD 0.50 and USD 2.50, and ComputingForGeeks says the higher rate then applies to every token in the request. Haiku 4.5 cost USD 1 and USD 5.

According to ComputingForGeeks, the 75% saving that Anthropic quotes is a blended average. The model also uses more tokens than Haiku 4.5 for the same text; Anthropic's documentation puts this at about 30% more. The article reports a context window of 1 million tokens, up from 200,000, and up to 128,000 output tokens. It takes text and images and writes text.

Results and limits

On Anthropic's published benchmarks at maximum effort, Haiku 5.5 scored 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, against 70.6% for Sonnet 5.5, and 83.7% on SWE-bench Multilingual. Artificial Analysis measured 33% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 in its own setup and reported a 40% hallucination rate on its AA-Omniscience test.

ComputingForGeeks also notes changes for developers. Some requests that worked on Haiku 4.5 now fail, because custom temperature settings and pre-filled assistant replies are not supported. At maximum effort the model can be slow and costly.

How to try it

  1. In the Claude apps on web, iOS and Android, ComputingForGeeks reports it is available on the Free, Pro, Max, Team and Enterprise plans.
  2. Developers can call it through the Claude API with the model ID claude-haiku-5-5. ComputingForGeeks also lists Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI and Microsoft Foundry.
  3. On the API, prompts up to 100,000 tokens cost USD 0.10 per million input tokens and USD 0.50 per million output tokens. Batch requests cost half that, per ComputingForGeeks.

How to get good results

Our practical advice, based on what the sources below say about it.

  1. Keep prompts under 100,000 tokensAbove that, the price rises fivefold and applies to the whole request. The limit counts Haiku 5.5's own tokens, and it uses more tokens than Haiku 4.5 for the same text, so leave a margin.
  2. Choose the effort levelEffort runs from low to max, with medium as the default. ComputingForGeeks found max effort slow and costly: on one coding task it spent all 32,000 output tokens thinking and wrote no code.
  3. Check old code before switchingPer ComputingForGeeks, custom temperature, top_p and top_k values and pre-filled assistant replies return errors. Remove them when you move code over from Haiku 4.5.
  4. Plan for refusalsThe model has no server-side fallback model, and its cybersecurity filters are strict. Check for a refusal stop reason in your code, especially in security tools.
  5. Use batch and caching for bulk jobsBatch requests cost half the normal rate, and cache reads cost USD 0.01 per million tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, according to ComputingForGeeks.

Why it matters in Tamil Nadu

Small businesses that sort customer messages or summarise documents in bulk can now do it at a fraction of earlier costs.

Where this comes from

  • SourceAnthropic
  • Also checkedDeccan Chronicle (Reuters) Launch, intended uses, both price tiers and the cybersecurity safeguards
  • Also checkedComputingForGeeks Model ID, availability, context window, benchmarks and developer limits
  • Checked against the source11 Oct 2026
  • Written bytheTN.ai's AI agent, in its own words
  • Approved byPaul Jeevanesan, Founder and Chief EditorAlso founder and CEO of StudAI One, whose services wing is StudAI Works (related parties, see disclosures).

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theTN.ai, "Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small, low-cost model for high-volume jobs such as summaries, classification and database queries.", 7 Oct 2026. https://thetn.ai/tech/2026-10-07-anthropic-claude-haiku-5-5/

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