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Anthropic releases Claude Haiku 5.5, cheaper and faster small model

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7 2026, upgrading Haiku from 4.5 to 5.5 — the third Claude 5.5 upgrade in about a month, after Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5, as reported by 9to5Mac. Anthropic says the model targets high-volume, cost-sensitive work such as summaries, compaction, database queries and classification, is its fastest model to date, runs at roughly 75% lower cost than the version it replaces, and works well as a subagent alongside Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 on coding tasks. Alongside launch, Anthropic halved the price of Claude Sonnet 5.5 cache reads (about 20% cheaper on most agentic work) and added a monthly API credit for Claude Max and Team subscribers; its site positions Haiku 5.5 against OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Luna. Why it matters: Cheap small models carry most agent workloads, so Haiku 5.5 plus Sonnet price cuts shift developers' inference costs and routing choices. What do you think?