Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5, Halves Sonnet 5.5 Cache Read Prices

Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 with steep price cuts

Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, which it calls the cheapest, fastest and most capable small model it has ever shipped. The company says it costs around 75% less to run on average than Claude Haiku 4.5, which launched on October 15, 2025. Pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for requests up to 100K tokens, compared with $1 and $5 for Haiku 4.5. Above 100K tokens, prices rise to $0.50 and $2.50 per million, with cache reads at $0.01 and $0.05 respectively.

Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku model with Anthropic's adjustable effort setting, letting users optimize for cost or intelligence on each task. It is available in the Claude Platform and Claude Code, and in Cursor, and is aimed at high volume, cost sensitive work such as summaries, compactions and database queries. Artificial Analysis scored it 43 on its Intelligence Index, up 26 points from the previous Haiku release, and Anthropic says it improves coding, computer use and knowledge work.

Sonnet 5.5 cache reads halved and API credits added

Alongside the launch, Anthropic cut the cache read price for Claude Sonnet 5.5 from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens, which it says makes Sonnet 5.5 around 20% cheaper to run on most long running work. The company also introduced monthly Claude Platform API credits for Max and Team plans: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x and up to $500 pooled for Team users. The credits work on any model, including Haiku 5.5, in code or third party harnesses.

The moves come as Anthropic prepares for a planned IPO. The Haiku 5.5 announcement landed minutes before OpenAI announced GPT-6 in Chat for everyone, intensifying the pricing competition between the two labs.

Microsoft opens Surface Laptop Ultra preorders

Microsoft has opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra, starting at $2,599 and shipping from October 16. The laptop is powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark chip, with an 18 core CPU, 5,120 core GPU and 24GB of RAM at the base configuration, and up to 128GB of RAM. Microsoft says it is under 18mm thin and under 4.5 lbs, and it includes what the company calls the world's first built in magnetic USB-C charging port, alongside three USB-C ports.

Microsoft also opened preorders for the $5,999 Surface RTX Spark Dev Box, a mini PC with 128GB of unified memory for running local models with 120B or more parameters, shipping in November. The event also featured MAI-Code-1.1 Flash, a 137B parameter coding model with a 256K context window, MXC containers for local agentic execution, and GitHub Copilot HydraFusion.

Sources: Techmeme