Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest model

The announcement has the price table and the company's benchmark comparisons in one place.

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model for high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summaries, classification, customer support and acting as a subagent for its larger models. Anthropic says it costs about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 and is its first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting. Alongside it, the company halved Sonnet 5.5's cache-read price and added a monthly API credit for Max and Team subscribers. The benchmark figures in the post are Anthropic's own.

Read it at the source

AnthropicIntroducing Claude Haiku 5.5 ↗ Hacker NewsDiscussion: Claude Haiku 5.5 ↗

Cascadic Analysis 3

UndertowBenchmark scores can overstate real-world reliability

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

The comparison table is Anthropic's own evaluation. Haiku 5.5's jump on agentic coding (39% versus 0% for Haiku 4.5) is large, which is a reason to check it on your own tasks before routing work to it.

UndertowMulti-agent systems can create cascading failures

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

Anthropic positions Haiku 5.5 as a subagent working under its larger models. In a chain of agents, a small model's confident mistake gets passed upward as an input, and the bigger model may build on it rather than catch it.

UndertowLoss of meaningful human control as capability and autonomy increase

What hidden risk could pull against this, even if the news is good?

At about 75% less than the previous Haiku, it's cheap to run many more agent steps per human reviewer. When autonomy gets cheaper faster than oversight does, oversight tends to thin out.

Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5, its cheapest and fastest model

Further down the stream