Claude Haiku 5.5: Anthropic's fastest model is also free to use

Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7 as the successor to Haiku 4.5. According to Anthropic's Haiku page, every plan from the free tier up to Enterprise can select the new model in the Claude apps on the web, iOS and Android. The model picker lists it as the fastest option, below Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5. Free users now get two current models, since Claude Sonnet 5.5 has been available on the free plan since late September. Opus 5.5 is still reserved for paid plans.

Anthropic compares it with GPT-6 Luna

Anthropic benchmarks Haiku 5.5 against GPT-6 Luna, the model OpenAI is rolling out to free ChatGPT users. GPT-6 Luna reached the regular chat in ChatGPT Free on October 8. In Anthropic's own table, Haiku 5.5 scores higher on every benchmark both models share. On OSWorld 2.1, which tests how well a model operates a computer, Haiku reaches 72.4% against Luna's 48.9%. On the Terminal-Bench 4.0 coding test, it scores 39.2% to 16.4%. The jump over Haiku 4.5 is even larger, since the older model managed 15.7% on OSWorld. No independent benchmarks are available yet, so all of these figures come from Anthropic. Decrypt gave the model a quick logic question and got a fast answer that was wrong.

API pricing drops by about 90%

For developers, the main change is the price. Anthropic's Haiku 5.5 announcement lists $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for requests of up to 100,000 tokens. Haiku 4.5 cost $1 and $5. Longer requests cost $0.50 and $2.50, and Anthropic puts the average saving at about 75%. The company has also halved the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5. GitHub added Haiku 5.5 to its paid Copilot plans on the same day, with a gradual rollout.

Monthly API credit for Max and Team

Anthropic is also rolling out a monthly credit for its developer platform this week. Max 5x subscribers get $100, Max 20x subscribers get $200, and Team plans get up to $500 that all members share. Anthropic lists no credit for Pro or Free. The credit works with every model, including Sonnet and Opus. Our comparison of free AI plans covers how ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude differ when you don't pay.