Claude Haiku 5.5
484 points - today at 6:01 PM
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Low messes up the bicycle frame, but medium/high/xhigh/max all get the bicycle frame right.
The max one took 5 minutes 9 seconds and cost 3.3826 cents. The cheapest one (low) cost 0.0936 cents and took 7 seconds.
The most recent release of my llm-anthropic plugin queries the Anthropic model listing API directly, so I didn't have to upgrade the plugin to add support for this model:
llm install llm-anthropic -U
llm anthropic refresh
llm -m claude-haiku-5.5 'prompt goes here'
EDIT: Here's the Haiku 4.5 pelican from a year ago for comparison, it was terrible: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/15/claude-haiku-45/ Input
$0.10 / MTok for prompts up to 100,000 tokens
$0.50 / MTok for prompts over 100,000 tokens
Output
$0.50 / MTok for prompts up to 100,000 tokens
$2.50 / MTok for prompts over 100,000 tokens
100k tokens is an absurdly low cutoff and it is only applicable to Haiku and not Sonnet or Opus. It's a low enough cutoff that it will be quickly exceeded if you are doing anything with Agents; for typical generation or Jev-like classifiers, it's a good value and as noted in this article, that is apparently the vast majority of Haiku use.In both cases, still much cheaper than Haiku 4.5's $1 input / $5 output and these prices better compete with GPT-6 Luna. ($0.10 input / $0.50 output, but with no token threshold [EDIT: the threshold for Luna is apparently 272k])
This is a very big benefit for me. I can now ship actual ai enhanced features behind my subscription without paying extra or fully relying on on-device models. I do worry that this is to soften the blow for user-unfriendly changes
> Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests up to 100,000 tokens, and 50% lower for requests over 100,000 tokens
Haiku and Luna now have the exact same price up to 100,000 tokens. Luna is now cheaper for anything after 100,000 tokens, even after Luna's own price increases at 270,000 it's still less than Haiku.
So it sounds like they've directly addressed that problem. Their self-reported benchmarks are all higher than Luna too.
Haiku 5.5: https://html.non.io/lcars-haiku-5.5/
Opus 5.5 for comparison: https://html.non.io/lcars-opus-5.5
Designs it was building from: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/5093e689-1e74-4f26-b632-2a4500f...
One interesting thing is it took a look at the job at hand, and immediately delegated it to Opus 5.5. It at least knows what it isn't good at. Very fast though, and likely best used for small subagent tasks / tightly scoped work.
Anthropic has really been doing all the right things in the past few weeks, while OpenAI continues to fumble the bag.
As such, I do not need to even reach for Haiku, and 4.5 was so inaccurate that it often cost more to do so in the past. Sonnet 5.5/low has been good for this kind of thing, and i didn't even touch thinking tokens or any of that. Opus 5.5 low for questions/repros, medium for implementation, basically never reaching for anything above that anymore. 5.5 has been great, so I'll try Haiku, but don't see myself going out of my way to integrate it.
Opus 5.5 runs 117 tps average on Openrouter, so it must be at least 10-20 tps slower for them to mention. IDK why they mention this as it does not help for marketing though. https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5.5
This section makes the reader think: why would I not pick Sonnet 5.5 instead of Haiku 5.5?
They’re definitely planning to make the subscriptions API based so they can charge you full price.
Was a big fan of Haiku 4.5, though understand why for most Sonnet was the far better option back then.
This is kind of nuts
I ask:
> how many r's in diminished
It answers:
> Diminished has 1 r.
Did anyone read this? We get free API credits on some plans now
GDPval-AA v2.1 as of now: 1620
GDPval-AA v2.1 for Haiku 4.5: 735
The 100k tokens pricing makes sense, looks to be a hedge against OpenAI's decisions API and Jev or its open source alternatives that are springing up.
Nice release, congrats to Anthropic.
She said she was using Haiku 4.5 because she was advised to be careful with the spending.
I hate that model so much lol.
> but they still block penetration testing and other techniques more likely to be used by attackers.
>
> Haiku 5.5’s biology safeguards are the same as for Sonnet 5, Sonnet 5.5, and Opus 5. They allow research biology questions but restrict access to requests that we judge as likely to cause harm. Organizations working on wider-ranging biology and cyber activities can apply to our Life Sciences Verification Program and Cyber Verification Program.
I would like to take a moment of your time to tell you about some of the "bioweapons" Anthropic has blocked that involved Haiku!These are the examples from "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647300
> Importantly, because our biological safety classifiers robustly block content involving high-risk biological research (in this case, the construction of enhanced pandemic potential pathogens), all of these exchanges occurred on models in our weakest class of models (specifically, the models were Claude Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, the latter of which the user began using after Sonnet 4 was deprecated).
>
> Upon a detailed examination of the exchanges, we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design. This is consistent with our understanding of the capabilities of Sonnet 4 and Haiku 4.5, which are not able to perform expert-level biology research tasks; we estimate that the uplift provided to the researcher was limited and substantially lower than it would have been from one of our more capable models.
Anthropic then says for the above, "we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design"While doing my best to avoid comment, please note, they're talking about a domain expert in a state research institution using Claude to do paperwork.
What did they save us from? What bioweapons did these filters prevent? From the front matter report,
> The above LLM platform is not the only route via which researchers engaged in viral gain-of-function research have used our platform. In May 2026, we discovered a researcher outside the US using Claude in their research on highly-pathogenic avian influenza (“bird flu”). The research focused on viruses’ adaptation to mammals, and the mechanism by which it causes severe disease beyond the respiratory tract.
OK. Sounds serious. "Gain of function research..." but who and why? > The researcher pursued this work in a credible institutional context, and interacted with Claude over the course of several weeks, exchanging thousands of messages. In these exchanges, the researcher leveraged Claude’s knowledge of the scientific literature to assist the researcher in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments. The researcher also used Claude for editorial assistance in writing up the research.
So this was a researcher inside of some country's national lab ("credible institutional context") doing research on dangerous viruses using Claude for "for editorial assistance in writing up the research."What "uplift" are you providing to scientists working at specialized global BSL-4 labs that already have – and I quote their report - "physical access to such isolates." (as in samples of viruses)? Are we uplifting their grammar?
These "safeguards" are being expanded. The scientists I know can't use Claude for grammar checks or anything serious. You can try it for yourself.
If you block pentest or "other techniques more likely to be used by attackers", then what does "permit a wider range of defensive tasks" even mean?
Any defensive task that's meaningful is almost indistinguishable from legitimate red-teaming that then falls under 'likely to be used by attackers". If only they would just stop nerfing these models, that'd be great. No APT is waiting around for Anthropic's permission, so might as well let us have some cool stuff.