Physix FrontierPhysix Frontier · News Briefing Card (IT Home · Oct 8, 2026)
Anthropic Ships Claude Haiku 5.5, Cost Down About 75%
KEY FACTS
- Anthropic released the Claude Haiku 5.5 small model on October 7.
- The company calls it the fastest and cheapest model in the Haiku line.
- The model costs on average about 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5.
- Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku model to support adjustable performance settings.
- Anthropic positions it as a sub-agent model for Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5.
KEY DATA
About 75%Operating cost reduction
$0.10 per million tokensInput price (≤100K tokens)
$0.50 per million tokensOutput price (≤100K tokens)
72.4%OSWorld 2.1 offline subset
PHYSIX OBSERVATION
The small-model price war has hit rock bottom, with Haiku 5.5 squeezing costs to a quarter of the previous generation and, for the first time, opening up adjustable performance tiers. This amounts to selling "cheap" and "good enough" separately, so users can just pick a tier by task. For developers, the trial-and-error cost in sub-agent scenarios drops sharply, and multi-agent architectures will spread faster.
Source: IT Home report