Claude Haiku
Anthropic’s fast, economical Claude tier for high-volume and latency-sensitive work.
Anthropic’s fast, cost-efficient Claude tier for high-volume chat, classification, extraction, and sub-agent steps where latency and price matter more than peak reasoning. Claude Haiku 5.5 (API id claude-haiku-5-5, released 2026-10-07) is the current Haiku: Anthropic’s fastest model at standard speed, the first Haiku with an adjustable effort setting, and around 75% cheaper to run than Haiku 4.5 on average. Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain better for complex agentic coding.
Why Claude Haiku matters
Haiku is how teams keep Claude in the stack when traffic is huge or steps must be cheap and fast—classification, extraction, chat, and worker sub-agents under Sonnet/Opus/Fable orchestrators.
Vision · Tool calling · Thinking · MCP · Coding
Last reviewed: 8 October 2026
When to choose Claude Haiku
Decision guidance for architects—not a feature list.
Best for
- High-volume chat and support
- Classification and extraction
- Fast sub-agent / worker steps
- Cost-sensitive production traffic
Avoid if
- You need peak Claude reasoning or long-horizon agents
- Hard coding and verification loops are the main job
Strengths
DataAIHub qualitative scores from 1 to 5, for architects. Not official benchmark results or a public ranking.
- Speed / latency★★★★★
- Cost efficiency★★★★★
- High-volume serving★★★★★
- Hard reasoning★★☆☆☆
- Open weights★☆☆☆☆
Ecosystem
Built by
- Anthropic
Haiku is Anthropic’s fast, cost-efficient Claude serving tier.
Alternative to
- Gemini Flash
Alternative fast proprietary tier when Google Cloud is the stack.
Works with
Recommended for
- AI Agents
Natural fit for high-volume sub-agent and worker steps.
Often paired with
- Claude Sonnet
Common pattern: Haiku for cheap worker steps, Sonnet for main agent reasoning.
How Claude Haiku evolved
Key moments in chronological order.
- Model
Anthropic releases claude-haiku-5-5 on the Claude Platform, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Priced by prompt length: $0.10 input / $0.50 output per 1M tokens up to 100K tokens, $0.50 / $2.50 above. 1M context, 128K max output, and the first Haiku with an adjustable effort setting (default medium). Anthropic says it costs around 75% less to run than Haiku 4.5 and is its fastest model at standard speed; it targets subagents, summaries, compaction, and classification.
- Model
Claude Haiku 4.5 era
Fast Claude tier with stronger reasoning at economical rates.
- Platform
Production high-volume default
Becomes the default Claude choice when latency and unit economics dominate.
- Product
Tool use on Haiku
Reliable tool calling makes Haiku practical for high-volume agent workers.
- Model
Claude 3 Haiku launches
Defines Haiku as Anthropic’s speed and cost brand in the Claude family.
- Model
Vision on Haiku
Image understanding lands on the fast tier for multimodal pipelines.
Overview
Capabilities
- Vision: Yes
- Audio input: No
- Tool calling: Yes
- Thinking: Yes
- MCP: Yes
- Coding: Yes
- Structured output: Yes
Technical specifications
- Provider
- Anthropic
- License
- Proprietary
- Context window
- 1M
- Parameters
- Undisclosed
- Architecture
- Transformer (proprietary)
- Release
- 2026-10
- Modalities
- Text, Image
- Vision
- Yes
- Audio input
- No
- Tool calling
- Yes
- Thinking
- Yes
- MCP
- Yes
- Open weights
- No
- API
- Yes
- Pricing (input)
- ~$0.10 per 1M tokens for prompts up to 100K; ~$0.50 above 100K (claude-haiku-5-5)
- Pricing (output)
- ~$0.50 per 1M tokens up to 100K; ~$2.50 above 100K
Supported modalities
Text · Image
Context window
1M (1,000,000 tokens)
Pricing
Haiku 5.5 is priced by prompt length. Cache read $0.01 / 5-minute cache write $0.125 / 1-hour cache write $0.20 (prompts over 100K: $0.05 / $0.625 / $1). Batch API is 50% off. Its newer tokenizer counts about 30% more tokens than Haiku 4.5 for the same text. Haiku 4.5 was $1/$5. Verify platform.claude.com.
Availability
Claude API id claude-haiku-5-5 (2026-10-07); also Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Claude Platform on AWS. 1M context and 128K max output (300K on Batch API, beta). Text and image input. Adaptive thinking with default effort medium. Generally available in GitHub Copilot (Pro, Pro+, Max, Business, and Enterprise; gradual rollout, 2026-10-07). From Claude Code v2.1.293 it is the default Haiku model on the Anthropic API. Anthropic lists Haiku 4.5 (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) for retirement not sooner than 2026-10-15. Messages API version 2026-10-21, the default in new Anthropic SDK majors and ant CLI 2.0.0, returns 400 if a request sends temperature, top_p, or top_k. Keep anthropic-version 2023-06-01 when a call still needs those parameters. On Amazon Bedrock, 2026-10-21 is only for Claude 4.7 and later. Those new SDK and CLI releases are Apache-2.0; earlier releases stay MIT.
Use cases
- High-volume chat and support
- Classification and extraction
- Fast sub-agent / worker steps
- Cost-sensitive production traffic
Strengths
- Speed and low latency
- Strong cost efficiency
- Good enough for many tool-calling tasks
Limitations
- Below Sonnet/Opus/Fable on hard reasoning and complex agentic coding
- Closed weights
- Prompts over 100K tokens cost 5× more per token
Related guides
Related benchmarks
Related research
- Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5
Original Paper
- Claude Haiku 5.5 model overview
Evaluation
Related GitHub
Related tools
Related rankings
Related comparisons
Companies
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