Claude Haiku 5.5: Pricing, Benchmarks, and Subagent Setup

Claude Haiku 5.5, released by Anthropic on October 7, 2026, is positioned as its fastest and lowest-cost small model for high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads such as summarization, classification, extraction, database queries, browser tasks, and subagent work. It offers a 1 million-token context window, adjustable effort levels, adaptive thinking, browser and computer-use support on selected platforms, and substantially improved benchmark results over Haiku 4.5, although Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain recommended for complex agentic coding. Pricing is advertised as roughly 75% lower on average than Haiku 4.5, though its newer tokenizer can count about 30% more tokens for equivalent text. Migration may require code changes because manual thinking budgets, custom sampling settings, assistant prefills, older computer-use tools, and certain conversation edits can return 400 errors. The material recommends testing model changes carefully across effort levels, tool use, refusals, prompt-injection behavior, output handling, and verification of completed tasks, particularly for production coding agents, chatbots, and browser agents.

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