Claude Haiku is the quickest, lowest-cost tier of Anthropic's Claude models; the current version, Claude Haiku 5.5, came out in October 2026.
In plain words
Anthropic sells Claude in tiers. Haiku sits at the quick, low-cost end, suiting jobs where speed matters or a service makes huge numbers of calls. The first Haiku arrived with the Claude 3 family in March 2024. Claude Haiku 5.5, released on 7 October 2026, is the first Haiku whose effort can be turned up or down, trading cost against intelligence. Through the API, for prompts up to 100,000 tokens, it costs $0.10 for each million tokens you send and $0.50 for each million it writes.
A quick example
A coding agent could hand small jobs, such as renaming a function across many files, to several Haiku 5.5 sub-agents working in parallel, while a larger Claude model plans the overall change.
Where you'll meet it
- Chat, voice agents and live support that need quick replies.
- Sub-agents working under a larger Claude model.
- High-volume jobs such as sorting, summarising and routing requests.
Related
Sources
- DocsClaude Haiku, Anthropic · read 20 Oct 2026
- DocsIntroducing the next generation of Claude, Anthropic · read 20 Oct 2026
- DocsModels overview, Claude Platform docs · read 7 Oct 2026
- DocsIntroducing Claude Haiku 5.5, Anthropic · read 7 Oct 2026
Checked by WhatIsAI against the sources above · 20 Oct 2026. Spotted an error? Report it.