Claude Haiku 5.5: Anthropic's cheapest small model, now with an effort setting
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on Oct 7. It is the first Haiku with adjustable effort. For prompts up to 100k tokens it costs $0.10 input and $0.50 output per million tokens, 90% below Haiku 4.5.
Why it matters
A cheap, capable small model changes the math for subagents, classification, summaries and compaction. You can run many more calls for the same budget and pair it with Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 as a worker model.
How to try
Call the Claude API with model "claude-haiku-5-5". It is also on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
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