Anthropic has released the small model Claude Haiku 5.5, claiming it to be the fastest, cheapest, and most capable small model to date, with an average operating cost approximately 75% lower than Haiku 4.5, targeting high-frequency, low-latency, cost-sensitive tasks such as summarization, classification, extraction, routing, and sub-agents.

For prompts under 100,000 tokens, the input price is $0.1 per million tokens, and output is $0.5; beyond 100,000 tokens, input rises to $0.5 and output to $2.5. Cache read prices are $0.01 and $0.05, while cache write prices are $0.125 and $0.625. The corresponding prices for Haiku 4.5 were $1 for input and $5 for output.

The company states that requests under 100,000 tokens account for about 90% of the previous generation Haiku's usage, with this pricing tier seeing a reduction of about 90%, and longer prompts dropping by about 50%. The new tokenizer increases the token count for equivalent text by about 30%, resulting in an adjusted average cost reduction of approximately 75%. The batch interface offers an additional 50% discount on input and output.

The model ID is claude-haiku-5-5, with a context window of 1 million tokens and a maximum output of 128,000 tokens, with knowledge cutoff in June 2026. It is now available on the Claude platform, Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Foundry; Bedrock coverage includes the U.S., EU, Australia, Japan, and global inference configurations, with GovCloud also open.

On the same day, the cache read price for Sonnet 5.5 was cut from $0.2 to $0.1 per million tokens, a 50% reduction. Cache reads account for a significant portion of token consumption in agent tasks, and the company claims this will reduce the operating cost of Sonnet 5.5 by about 20% for most agent tasks. For short prompts, Haiku 5.5's input and output are about one-twentieth of Sonnet 5.5's.

Buyers are applications and cloud customers moving classification, summarization, and sub-tasks from large models, while sellers are Anthropic's token-priced inference capacity. The event is driven by the generational shift of small models and the price reduction of mid-tier model caches. Funding is shifting from high-priced long context calls to low-priced short calls, with Anthropic using the price difference to retain usage within its own tier, while cloud vendors receive new SKUs for resale. The pressure is on alternative small models still priced at Haiku 4.5 and customers continuing to run simple tasks on Sonnet.

Short prompt input drops from $1 to $0.1, and output from $5 to $0.5, with the price difference itself serving as a migration incentive. Prices jump fivefold after 100,000 tokens, pushing long context back towards Sonnet and Opus.

Source: Public Information