Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 With Steep Price Cuts; Microsoft Preps RTX Spark Surface Laptop

Anthropic launches Claude Haiku 5.5 with steep price cuts

Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, which it describes as 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, its predecessor from October 2025. Pricing is tiered: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for requests up to 100K tokens, rising to $0.50 and $2.50 above that threshold, with cache reads at $0.01 and $0.05 respectively.

Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, letting users optimize for cost or intelligence on each task, and it adds adaptive thinking. Anthropic positions it for high volume, cost sensitive work such as summaries, compactions and database queries, and says it pairs well with Opus 5.5 or Sonnet 5.5 as a subagent. Artificial Analysis scored the model 43 on its Intelligence Index, up 26 points from the last Haiku release, and reported large benchmark gains, including OSWorld rising from 15.7% to 72.4%.

Alongside the model, Anthropic halved the cache read price on Claude Sonnet 5.5 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 subscribers: $100 for Max 5x, $200 for Max 20x and up to $500 pooled for Team users, applicable to any model including Haiku 5.5.

Microsoft opens Surface Laptop Ultra preorders with RTX Spark

Microsoft has opened preorders for the Surface Laptop Ultra, its new flagship notebook powered by Nvidia RTX Spark, with shipments expected to begin October 16 and prices starting at $2,599. The laptop includes three USB-C ports, one of them magnetic in the style of MagSafe, and is part of a broader RTX Spark PC lineup that also includes models from partners such as Dell and Asus.

The launch is tied to Microsoft's local AI push for Windows. The company detailed MAI-Code-1.1 Flash, a 137B parameter coding model with a 256K context window, MXC containers as a local sandbox for agentic execution, and Hybrid Intelligence for Copilot, which can use context on the PC and local models with user permission. Microsoft says the new laptop outperforms MacBooks on AI workloads, and Nvidia and MediaTek promoted RTX Spark as a platform for creating, AI development and gaming.

Biren raises about $515M in new share sale

Shanghai based AI chipmaker Biren has raised about $515 million in a new share sale, according to Bloomberg. The company's Hong Kong listed stock is down more than 50% from a June peak but remains up around 70% year to date.

Sources: Techmeme