Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5 as Microsoft Debuts RTX Spark Surface Laptop Ultra

Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5

Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, which it calls the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model it has ever shipped. The model targets high-volume, cost-sensitive workloads such as summaries, compactions, classifications, and database queries, and is available in the Claude Platform and Claude Code. Anthropic says it costs around 75% less to run on average than Claude Haiku 4.5, which launched on October 15, 2025.

Haiku 5.5 is the first Haiku model with an adjustable effort setting, letting users optimize for cost or intelligence on each task. Pricing is tiered: $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for requests up to 100K tokens, with cache reads at $0.01, rising to $0.50 and $2.50 with $0.05 cache reads above 100K. Haiku 4.5 was priced at $1 and $5. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Haiku 5.5 scores 43, up 26 points from the previous Haiku release, with reported jumps on OSWorld, HLE, and Chartography.

Price Cuts and API Credits

Alongside the launch, Anthropic halved the cache read price on Claude Sonnet 5.5 to $0.10 per million tokens, which it says makes the model 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 plans, applicable to any model including Haiku 5.5. The moves come ahead of Anthropic's planned IPO.

Microsoft Debuts RTX Spark Surface Laptop Ultra

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, developed in collaboration with MediaTek, and includes three USB-C ports, one of them magnetic in the style of MagSafe. Microsoft says the device outperforms MacBooks and is part of a broader Windows push that includes the MAI-Code-1.1 Flash coding model with 137B parameters and a 256K context window, MXC containers as a local sandbox for agentic execution, and Copilot features that can tap into PC context and use local models.

Nvidia Weighed OpenRouter Bid

In related news, The Information reports that Nvidia considered a last-minute bid for OpenRouter and told its leadership it was prepared to make a generous offer, but OpenRouter did not want to wait.

Sources: Techmeme