What changed
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 across its API, apps and major cloud platforms. The small model adds adjustable effort and targets summaries, classification, browser use and coding subagents at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens.
Why it matters
The pricing makes delegated model calls materially cheaper, so teams can reserve stronger models for hard reasoning while moving repetitive classification, compaction and tool work to a smaller tier.
What to do
Route one high-volume, low-risk task to claude-haiku-5-5, compare accuracy, latency and total cache-adjusted cost against the current model, and keep a stronger fallback for ambiguous or consequential decisions.
Caveat
Anthropic's capability and benchmark claims are vendor-run, and Sonnet 5.5 remains the stronger choice for complex agentic coding. Long prompts use higher input, output and cache prices than the headline tier.