Anthropic is making a push to lower the cost of running AI at scale, launching Claude Haiku 5.5 on Wednesday as the latest model in its Claude 5.5 lineup.
The new model is aimed at high-volume tasks where companies need AI to respond quickly without paying flagship-model prices. Anthropic said Haiku 5.5 costs about 75% less to run on average than its predecessor, Claude Haiku 4.5.
The pricing move comes as AI companies increasingly compete not just on model performance, but on how cheaply those models can handle the growing number of tasks being pushed to AI systems.
Cheaper AI For High-Volume Work
Haiku 5.5 is designed for jobs such as classification, summarization, information extraction, customer support and browser-based tasks. Anthropic also expects developers to use it as a lower-cost sub-agent alongside its more capable Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5 models.
For shorter requests, the price reduction is even steeper. Anthropic said Haiku 5.5 costs 90% less per token than Haiku 4.5 for tasks below 100,000 tokens, which account for roughly 90% of requests to its previous Haiku model. Longer tasks are priced at about half the cost of Haiku 4.5.
That could make the model particularly relevant for businesses running AI agents, where a single user request can trigger multiple model calls and quickly drive up inference costs.
Haiku 5.5 also gives developers more control over that trade-off. Its adjustable effort setting allows users to choose how much reasoning the model uses, effectively letting them prioritize lower costs and faster responses or spend more compute when a task requires stronger reasoning.
The release completes Anthropic’s rollout of its Claude 5.5 family. The company introduced Claude Opus 5.5 in September and followed with Sonnet 5.5 later that month. Sonnet 5.5 was positioned as a faster, lower-cost model for everyday work, while Opus 5.5 is designed for more demanding agentic and professional tasks.
Anthropic is also cutting the cost of cached inputs for Sonnet 5.5, another move aimed at agentic workloads that repeatedly access the same information.
Haiku 5.5 is available through Anthropic’s platform as well as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
Haiku Launch Comes Ahead Of IPO
The launch comes as Anthropic builds out its product lineup ahead of a potential public offering that could come as early as mid-November.
The Claude-maker could begin actively marketing the offering during the week of Nov. 9, potentially setting up a stock market debut before Thanksgiving on Nov. 26. The discussions are still underway, and the timing is subject to change again.
Anthropic has been reported to be targeting a valuation of about $2 trillion, which would make the IPO larger than Space Exploration Technologies Corp.‘s $1.78 trillion debut and potentially the largest IPO ever.
Photo: Shutterstock