Claude Haiku 5.5 arrives with massive price cuts proving the AI pricing arms race is far from over

Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, the company's fastest and most affordable small model to date. Benchmark results show a major performance jump over its predecessor, and Anthropic is also cutting prices for Sonnet 5.5.

Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks like summarization, database queries, classification, and live customer support, according to Anthropic. On average, the model costs about 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5. For requests with prompts up to 100,000 tokens, which Anthropic says account for roughly 90 percent of all previous Haiku requests, prices drop by up to 90 percent. Prompts longer than 100,000 tokens cost five times as much.

Price per 1 million tokens	Haiku 5.5 (prompts up to / over 100k)	Haiku 4.5	Sonnet 5.5
Cache Reads	$0.01 / $0.05	$0.10	$0.10
Cache Writes	$0.125 / $0.625	$1.25	$2.50
Input Tokens	$0.10 / $0.50	$1.00	$2.00
Output tokens	$0.50 / $2.50	$5.00	$10.00

Anthropic points out that Haiku 5.5 uses an updated tokenizer that consumes slightly more tokens per task than its predecessor. The same thing happened with the Opus 4.x models, where token usage jumped about 30 percent from the tokenizer change alone. Real-world savings are likely smaller than the per-token prices suggest.

Benchmarks show a big leap over Haiku 4.5

Haiku 5.5 scores 1,620 on the knowledge benchmark GDPval-AA v2.1, more than double the 735 its predecessor managed. On Humanity's Last Exam, it hits 45.9 percent without tools and 57.4 percent with tools, up from 10.2 and 18.7 percent.

The biggest jump is in computer use, where the model operates a computer on its own. Since computer use burns through large amounts of tokens, a cheap, fast model like Haiku 5.5 is a natural fit. It scores 72.4 percent on OSWorld-2.1, up from 15.7 percent. On the agentic coding benchmark Terminal-Bench 4.0, it reaches 39.2 percent while Haiku 4.5 scored zero.