Anthropic has introduced Claude Haiku 5.5, a new artificial intelligence model designed to deliver faster performance while significantly reducing the cost of running high-volume AI applications.

The launch expands Anthropic’s Claude 5.5 model family and comes as competition among leading AI companies intensifies. Haiku 5.5 is positioned as a smaller model that can handle large numbers of routine and time-sensitive tasks without requiring the computing resources associated with larger AI systems.

According to Anthropic, Haiku 5.5 is its fastest and most capable Haiku model so far. The company has designed it for applications including summarization, classification, information extraction, database queries and other repetitive workloads.

One of the most notable aspects of the release is its pricing. For prompts of up to 100,000 tokens, Anthropic lists an input price of $0.10 per million tokens and an output price of $0.50 per million tokens. The company says the model is around 75% cheaper to run on average than its previous Haiku 4.5 model.

The lower cost could make smaller AI models more attractive for businesses that need to process large volumes of information. Customer-support systems, voice assistants, document-processing platforms and software agents are among the potential applications for the new model.

Anthropic has also highlighted improvements in computer-use capabilities. Haiku 5.5 is intended to work with AI agents that can interact with software and complete multi-step tasks, making speed particularly important for applications that require repeated actions.

The company is introducing an adjustable effort setting with Haiku 5.5, allowing users to make a trade-off between computational cost and intelligence depending on the complexity of a task.

The new model is available through Anthropic’s platform and can also be accessed through major cloud infrastructure providers. It is additionally available to Claude users across several subscription tiers.

Anthropic has simultaneously reduced the cache-read price for Claude Sonnet 5.5, saying the change can lower the cost of many agent-based workloads. The company is also adding API credits for some subscribers to encourage developers to experiment with AI applications and agents.

The launch is significant because the AI industry is increasingly moving toward specialized models rather than relying exclusively on the largest available systems. Smaller models can provide a practical balance between capability, speed and operating cost.

For businesses, this could mean that AI-powered services become economical even when they must handle millions of requests. Developers may also be able to use smaller models for routine tasks while reserving larger models for complex reasoning and advanced coding.

Anthropic’s latest release demonstrates how the AI competition is expanding beyond simply building larger models. Speed, efficiency, pricing and the ability to operate AI agents are becoming equally important factors in determining which systems businesses choose.

As organizations continue integrating artificial intelligence into everyday software, models such as Claude Haiku 5.5 could play an important role in making high-volume AI services faster and more affordable.