Claude Haiku 5.5 (Medium)

Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's small and fast language model designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads such as data extraction, summarization, and live customer support. Released on October 7, 2026, it represents a substantial upgrade over its predecessor, bringing advanced capabilities closer to the larger models in the Claude 5.5 family while offering significantly lower operational costs.

The model features a 1-million-token context window and supports multimodal inputs including text and images. Claude Haiku 5.5 is the first model in the Haiku class to incorporate adaptive effort controls, allowing users to tune intelligence levels and compute budgets dynamically per task. It delivers strong performance on tool use, basic coding tasks, and computer use benchmarks, closing much of the gap traditionally seen between small workhorse models and frontier models.

Optimized for latency-sensitive applications, Haiku 5.5 is frequently deployed as a cost-effective subagent alongside larger models like Claude Sonnet 5.5 and Claude Opus 5.5. Its pricing structure significantly reduces per-token expenses for prompts under 100,000 tokens, making it suitable for high-frequency automation and agentic workflows requiring rapid inference.