Anthropic AI Updates: October 8, 2026

1. Claude Haiku 5.5 Launches at $0.10/$0.50 per Million Tokens, Sonnet 5.5 Cache Reads Halved

Anthropic. Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 (claude-haiku-5-5), priced at $0.10 input and $0.50 output per million tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens, and $0.50/$2.50 above that. Anthropic puts the average saving versus Haiku 4.5 ($1/$5) at about 75%, after accounting for a new tokenizer that uses slightly more tokens per task. It is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort setting. Reported scores include 72.4% on OSWorld 2.1 (offline subset, versus 15.7% for Haiku 4.5 and 83.9% for Sonnet 5.5), 39.2% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (Sonnet 5.5: 70.6%), and 57.4% on Humanity’s Last Exam with tools. Anthropic pitches it for high-volume work (classification, summarization, compaction, support, browser use) and as a coding subagent, while recommending Sonnet 5.5 or Opus 5.5 for complex agentic coding. It is available now on the Claude API. Alongside the launch, Anthropic halved Sonnet 5.5 cache reads to $0.10 per million tokens (about 20% cheaper on most agentic tasks, per Anthropic), started giving Max and Team subscribers monthly API credits, and added beta computer use and browser use support to its Python and TypeScript SDKs. Source

2. Claude Code 2.1.293 Makes Haiku 5.5 the Default Haiku Model and Extends Mod and Subagent Hooks

Anthropic. Claude Code 2.1.293, tagged on October 7, adds Claude Haiku 5.5 and makes it the default Haiku model on the Anthropic API. The changelog lists a 1M-token context window for the model. For mod authors, $.tool.register gains an isDeferred flag: setting it to false puts a tool’s schema in the prompt from the start instead of behind tool search. The subagentStatusLine payload now includes agentType, so status line scripts can tell custom subagent types apart. Most of the rest of the release is fixes, including a memory leak in HTTP MCP connections and a bug where Claude treated work from before a context compaction as unfinished and redid it. Source