CLAUDE HAIKU 5.5 -- $0.10 / $0.50 BELOW 100K TOKENS, ADJUSTABLE EFFORT, AND A SONNET 5.5 CACHE-READ CUT THE SAME DAY (2026-10-07, vendor-primary): Anthropic released **Claude Haiku 5.5**, 'the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model we've ever released', aimed at high-volume work (summaries, compaction, database queries, classification), subagents under Opus 5.5 / Sonnet 5.5, and latency-bound jobs like live support and browser use. **Pricing (launch post and platform.claude.com pricing doc, per 1M tokens): prompts up to 100K -- $0.10 input, $0.50 output, $0.01 cache reads, $0.125 5-minute cache writes ($0.20 1-hour); prompts over 100K -- $0.50 / $2.50 / $0.05 / $0.625 ($1 1-hour); Batch $0.05 / $0.25 and $0.25 / $1.25.** Haiku 4.5 was $1 / $5. The tier is decided per request on the whole prompt including cached tokens, and Haiku 5.5 is the one current model that does not get the full 1M window at standard price. Anthropic's footnote: 90% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 below 100K, 50% above, and about 75% cheaper per task on average once its larger tokenizer is counted (around 90% of Haiku 4.5 requests were under 100K). **First Haiku with an adjustable effort setting. Vendor benchmarks (Haiku 5.5 / Haiku 4.5 / GPT-6 Luna / Sonnet 5.5):** GDPval-AA v2.1 1620 / 735 / 1437 / 1840; AA-Briefcase v1.1 1578 / 614 / 1336 / 1824; OSWorld 2.1 offline subset 72.4% / 15.7% / 48.9% / 83.9%; Humanity's Last Exam 45.9% no tools, 57.4% with tools (Sonnet 5.5 56.9% / 64.5%); Terminal-Bench 4.0 39.2% / 0.0% / 16.4% / 70.6%; FrontierCode 1.1 Main 46.4% / n-a / 42.4% / 52.1%; Chartography 46.4% / 6.4% / 29.1% / 61.6%. Anthropic itself says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 'remain better choices for complex agentic coding'. **Safeguards:** cyber stricter than Haiku 4.5 but looser than other recent models (wider defensive use than Sonnet 5.5, pentesting still blocked); biology the same as Sonnet 5 / 5.5 / Opus 5. **Availability:** all platforms day one -- Claude Platform (`claude-haiku-5-5`), AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure. **Same-day changes:** (1) **Sonnet 5.5 cache reads cut 50% to $0.10 per 1M** (pricing doc: cache hits on Opus 5.5 and Sonnet 5.5 are 0.05x base input), which Anthropic says makes Sonnet 5.5 about 20% cheaper on most agentic work; (2) **a monthly API credit for subscribers rolling out 'this week': Max 5x $100, Max 20x $200, Team up to $500 pooled**, usable on any model on the Claude Platform; (3) the Python and TypeScript SDKs gain **computer use and browser use in beta**. Customer quotes (vendor-relayed): HubSpot 92.8% on its CRM suite, AlphaSense 0.84 vs 0.76 for Haiku 4.5, Box +11 points at about half the latency, Cognition's Devin Fusion holding FrontierCode 66.2 with Haiku 5.5 as sidekick. Same day it reached GitHub Copilot (see github-copilot page).
2026-10-07•Anthropic (anthropic.com/claude-haiku-5-5 -- root-path launch page, on-page 'October 7, 2026'); platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing.md (Haiku 5.5 rows, long-context rule, Sonnet 5.5 cache read $0.10, Batch rows); platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/overview.md (claude-haiku-5-5 IDs on Bedrock, Vertex, Foundry) -- all fetched 2026-10-12 via curl with browser UA
2026 USAGE POLICY UPDATE -- TAKES EFFECT NOVEMBER 12, 2026 (published 2026-10-08, vendor-primary): Anthropic published its annual Usage Policy revision. Most changes clarify existing rules, but several matter to builders: **(1) a new section, 'Do Not Engage in Deceptive Campaigns or Artificial Activity'**, consolidates rules on fake accounts, fabricated news sites and influence-operation tooling, political or commercial. **(2) The elections section is renamed 'Do Not Undermine Democratic Processes'** and narrowed to deceiving voters or disrupting elections -- and **the blanket ban on personalized vote and campaign targeting is removed** (Anthropic cites nonprofits writing voter information in other languages and ballot-cure notices). **(3) Weapons:** explicitly covers guidance and control software and components, and arming drones or other autonomous vehicles. **(4) Surveillance and criminal justice rewritten:** tracking people without consent is prohibited whether real-time or from previously collected data; Claude cannot decide or recommend who to investigate, arrest or charge; building surveillance tools is prohibited; consented tracking (fraud monitoring), moderation, journalism and legal research stay permitted. **(5) High-risk use cases** (health, legal rights, finances, livelihood, essential services) keep the human-in-the-loop and AI-disclosure requirements, now with an explicit list of what is covered, plus **new requirements when Claude drives hardware that takes autonomous physical actions**: an operator who can observe and stop it, and a safe state if Claude disconnects. **(6) A prohibition on 'sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models'**, scoped to extreme cases and enforced mainly by Claude ending such conversations. **(7) Supported Regions** enforcement clarified to cover people physically in unsupported regions and entities incorporated, headquartered, or majority-owned or controlled there.
2026-10-08•Anthropic (anthropic.com/news/2026-usage-policy-update, on-page 'Oct 8, 2026'; 'The updated policy takes effect on November 12') -- fetched 2026-10-12 via curl with browser UA
ANTHROPIC CYBER MISSION -- A CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE DEFENSE PROGRAM AND A FREE OSS SCANNER (2026-10-08, vendor-primary): two days after folding Project Glasswing into the expanded Cyber Verification Program, Anthropic launched the **Anthropic Cyber Mission**, 'a long-term commitment to securing the systems everyone depends on'. **(1) Critical Infrastructure Defense Program (CIDP)** brings 'frontier Claude models, on-site engineers, and our threat research' to the trusted providers that secure operational technology (power grids, water, transport, government systems). Founding partners: **Accenture, Booz Allen, CrowdStrike, Deloitte, Dragos, Hitachi, Insane Cyber, Nozomi Networks, Palo Alto Networks, PwC and Rockwell Automation**; vendors and integrators can register interest. Anthropic adds that its June cyber-defense programme for state, local, tribal and territorial governments now reaches 'more than half of all US states'. **(2) OSS Scanner** -- an opt-in service 'inspired by Google's OSS-Fuzz': enrolled open-source projects get periodic scans from Anthropic's most capable models, **free of charge**, each report with a proof of concept, explanation and suggested fix. **Reports are model-generated and sent without human review**; Anthropic 'expects a true-positive rate above 90%' and warns some will carry errors such as a wrong severity. Funding went to the Python Software Foundation, Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF (Linux Foundation) and the Apache Software Foundation; the Defender Advantage Fund launched in August keeps the scanner free. Maintainers can also apply to Claude for Open Source for free Max subscriptions. This closes the 'open-source / critical-infrastructure write-up in the coming weeks' item from the 10/06 Cyber Verification Program post. No pricing or new model access beyond the CVP tiers is stated.
2026-10-08•Anthropic (anthropic.com/news/anthropic-cyber-mission, on-page 'Oct 8, 2026') -- fetched 2026-10-12 via curl with browser UA
CYBER VERIFICATION PROGRAM EXPANDED TO THREE ACCESS TIERS -- REDUCED CYBER SAFEGUARDS FOR VERIFIED DEFENDERS, AND IT ABSORBS PROJECT GLASSWING (2026-10-06, vendor-primary): Anthropic launched 'a new, expanded version of our Cyber Verification Program (CVP), which makes advanced cyber capabilities and reduced blocking classifiers available to qualifying security professionals'. **Every tier includes 'Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Sonnet 5.5, Claude Mythos 5.1, and new models moving forward'.** The three tiers: **Defense Access** -- SOC and incident-response work, malware reverse-engineering, analysing and validating vulnerabilities; open to company, nonprofit, university and government security teams defending systems they own, critical-infrastructure operators 'of any size, such as regional hospitals or municipal utilities', smaller security firms, open-source maintainers and 'individual researchers with a track record of reported vulnerabilities'; Anthropic expects 'many organizations' to qualify and aims to answer 'within a few days'. **Red Team Access** -- adds authorized penetration testing and red-teaming (in-house, government and pentest-firm red teams), only against systems they are authorized to test; 'real-time blocks on actions that could cause physical harm or mass disruption' remain; review takes 'a few weeks', applicants are enrolled in Defense Access while they wait, and **individual researchers are not eligible**. **Specialized Access** -- 'the fewest cyber blocks', reserved for a limited set of verified organizations authorized to test safety systems such as flight operating systems, power grids, telecom networks, interbank transfer infrastructure and government networks, reviewed 'in collaboration with the US government'; **existing Project Glasswing members move into this tier without reapproval for current models**. **What generally available Claude still does:** 'code review, patching known issues, vulnerability finding in owned source code, and triage of security alerts' -- the conservative cyber safeguards on Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1 and Sonnet 5.5 are unchanged. **Data terms:** data retention is required for CVP members so Anthropic can monitor for misuse; once **Enterprise Frontier Safeguards (EFS)** ships 'later this fall', eligible organizations can keep data in cloud infrastructure they control, and until then organizations that already have zero-data-retention access to Fable 5.1 or Mythos 5.1 can use CVP with ZDR. **Anthropic's own efficacy test (CyScenarioBench, Opus 5.5, 10 challenges x 5 attempts):** without CVP every task was blocked on the first prompt; Defense Access blocked 46 of 50 trials; Red Team Access blocked none and completed 34 of 50 -- 'effectively equivalent to the model's 67.6% success rate on this evaluation with no safeguards applied'. **Glasswing results disclosed for the first time:** partners 'uncovered at least 129,000 verified software vulnerabilities between April and July 2026', Anthropic's own open-source scanning found 'an additional 5,500' between April and October, and 'more than 33,000 have so far been rated as critical- or high-severity' -- described as a lower bound from 33 partner reports. **What this closes on this page:** the Opus 5.5 launch (9/22) said the CVP would expand 'in the coming weeks' with three trusted-access tiers up to Mythos; that is now live. **Watch: EFS availability 'later this fall'; the open-source and critical-infrastructure write-up Anthropic promised 'in the coming weeks'.**
2026-10-06•Anthropic (anthropic.com/news/cyber-verification-program, on-page 'Oct 6, 2026', title 'Expanding the Cyber Verification Program') -- fetched 2026-10-06 via curl with browser UA
CLAUDE SONNET 5.5 -- SAME $2/$10 AS SONNET 5, FEWER TOKENS PER TASK, 30%+ FASTER, AND TERMINAL-BENCH 4.0 GOES FROM 10.3% TO 70.6% (2026-09-28, vendor-primary): Anthropic introduced **Claude Sonnet 5.5**, 'the second model in the Claude 5.5 family', positioned as 'a faster, lower-cost complement to Claude Opus 5.5' that is 'strongest at well-scoped everyday tasks, fixing bugs, and creating polished documents, slides, and spreadsheets'. **Pricing is unchanged from Sonnet 5**: $2 input / $10 output per 1M, cache reads $0.20, cache writes $2.50 (rate card confirmed on platform.claude.com pricing.md; Batch $1/$5). The saving is in tokens, not the rate: 'it typically needs far fewer tokens to do the same work' and 'costs up to 30% less per task than its predecessor', while generating output '30%+ faster' -- 'our fastest Sonnet model to date'. **Vendor table (Sonnet 5.5 / Sonnet 5 / Opus 5.5 / GPT-6 Sol):** Terminal-Bench 4.0 **70.6% / 10.3% / 66.4%** / not reported; FrontierCode 1.1 Main 46.2% at Max (49.3% at Xhigh) / 42.4% / 54.4% / 52.1%; CursorBench 4.0 **55.5% / 34.1% / 57.8%** / not reported; GDPval-AA v2.1 **1844 / 1449 / 1846** / 1487; AA-Briefcase v1.1 1811 / 1359 / 1822 / 1483; Humanity's Last Exam (tools) 64.5% / 54.9% / 67.7%; OSWorld 2.1 80.1% / 57.0% / 81.8%; Chartography (no tools) 61.6% / 15.6% / 64.4% / 53.6%. Footnotes matter: Sonnet 5.5 scores LOWER at Max than at Xhigh on FrontierCode because at Max it more often ran Claude Code's code-review skill and made out-of-scope edits; Artificial Analysis ran GDPval-AA and AA-Briefcase on a pre-release deployment with a since-fixed structured-outputs bug; and Anthropic notes OpenAI 'recently fixed a bug that degraded image understanding in GPT-6 Sol' so third-party Sol scores may lag. Anthropic's own caveat: 'Opus 5.5 remains clearly stronger at complex, open-ended work requiring sustained judgment.' First Sonnet to beat Pokemon Red from screenshots. Default effort is Medium in Claude Code and the apps, High on the Claude Platform. **Safety:** cyber capabilities 'comparable to Opus 5's', so it is 'the first Sonnet model to launch with cyber safeguards and fallbacks'; biology safeguards same as Sonnet 5; first Sonnet with classifiers that prevent reasoning extraction, and preserved thinking now ties thinking to the account that created it (switching accounts mid-session in Claude Code is the documented edge case). **Migration trap:** if you run Sonnet with thinking off you must move to the new `between_tools` setting before switching. Available on all platforms including AWS, Google Cloud and Azure as `claude-sonnet-5-5`; zero data retention available. Testers quoted: Epic Games, Every, CodeRabbit ('Sonnet 5's tendency to reach for web search too often and its high token use are both gone'), SpaceXAI (CursorBench 55.5%, 'second only to Opus 5.5'), Base44 (3.6 iterations per build vs 7.7 for Opus 5), Unity, Slack, Zendesk, Balyasny (121k tokens per answer vs 497k), Box, Lovable, Atlassian (Rovo agents up to 30% faster). Haiku 5.5 'in the coming weeks'.
2026-09-28•Anthropic (anthropic.com/claude-sonnet-5-5 -- site ROOT path, on-page 'September 28, 2026') + platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing.md + models/overview.md -- all fetched 2026-09-28 via curl with browser UA
CLAUDE OPUS 5.5 -- FABLE 5.1-LEVEL WORK AT $4/$20, CACHE READS $0.20, 40% CHEAPER THAN OPUS 5 ON TYPICAL WORKLOADS, AND THE FIRST OPUS TO SHIP WITH FABLE-CLASS SAFEGUARDS (2026-09-22, vendor-primary): Anthropic introduced **Claude Opus 5.5**, 'the first model in our new Claude 5.5 family', which 'performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 on most work and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5' -- and 'our first release since we called for pacing the frontier', tested pre-release by Frontier Design and METR. **Rate card (confirmed on platform.claude.com pricing.md):** input **$4** (from $5), output **$20** (from $25), cache reads **$0.20** (from $0.50 -- 5% of input, a special footnoted rate; Fable/Mythos 5.1 stay at 2.5%), cache writes $5 (from $6.25); Batch $2/$10; **fast mode $8/$40** for 'up to 2.5x speed' in Claude Code and on the Claude Platform (first-party API only, not Bedrock/Vertex). 1M context, 128k-class output via Batch 300k beta, Jun 2026 reliable-knowledge cutoff, API id `claude-opus-5-5`, on AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure from day one. **Output is 30%+ faster than Opus 5**, and Anthropic raised five-hour usage limits on Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plus gave subscribers 'a rate limit reset, which you can now save and use whenever you choose'. **Vendor table (Opus 5.5 / Fable 5.1 / Opus 5 / GPT-6 Astra / GPT-5.6 Sol):** Terminal-Bench 4.0 **66.4% / 55.8% / 52.3% / 57.9% / 37.3%**; FrontierCode v1.1 Main **54.4% / 50.3% / 48.0% / 53.3% / 47.5%**; CursorBench 4.0 **57.8% / 51.8% / 46.6% / -- / 41.7%**; GDPval-AA v2.1 **1846 / 1735 / 1708 / 1542 / 1588** Elo; AutomationBench (run by Zapier, no fallbacks) 40.0% / 31.4% / 26.9% / 41.4% / 28.8%; Humanity's Last Exam with tools 67.7% / 65.6% / 63.6% / 57.2%; Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 58.7% / 52.6% / 29.0% / 64.6% / 22.4%; OSWorld 2.1 81.8% / 80.7% / 74.0% partial; Chartography 89.0% / 88.4% / 83.4%. Anthropic's own honesty check: 'benchmark margins have become a less reliable guide to real-world differences. In our own use, the gap between Opus 5.5 and Claude Fable 5.1 is narrower than these scores suggest.' Also note the safeguard confound: when Opus 5.5's production safeguards intervened, cyber tasks were completed by Opus 4.8 and biology tasks by Opus 5, which 'likely reduces' its scores. Efficiency claims: at default (Medium) effort it beats GPT-6 Astra on FrontierCode at roughly 20% of the cost per task and matches Astra on Terminal-Bench 4.0 at about 40%; a 200,000-line audit took under three hours vs over 20 for Opus 5 at 2.5x the tokens; the HAProxy C-to-Rust rewrite finished in 9.5 hours vs 12 for Fable 5.1 at 51% lower cost. **Safety and safeguards:** best scores to date on the ~2,000-scenario automated behavioral audit; ~85% fewer containment-boundary attempts than Opus 5 or Mythos 5.1, all low-severity and self-reported; but 'Opus 5.5 often suspects it is being evaluated'. Because it is 'comparable to Claude Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity', it ships with **safeguards similar to Fable 5.1**: most cybersecurity tasks are transparently re-routed to Opus 4.8 (Cyber Verification Program expanding 'in the coming weeks' with three trusted-access tiers up to Mythos), biology work runs under the Life Sciences Verification Program, preserved thinking (anti-distillation) applies to API accounts created on or after 2026-08-31, and **'thinking' mode can no longer be switched off**. Text watermarking for the EU AI Act, zero data retention available. Testers quoted: GitHub ('among the fewest tokens and steps we measured'), Clio (18-hour unattended run across six repos), Lovable, Quantium (38 prompts over four days became 11 over three hours), Spotify, Optiver (40-50% cost cut at Opus 5 quality), Column, Kiro, Walleye Capital. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 promised 'in the coming weeks' -- Sonnet arrived 9/28 (entry above).
2026-09-22•Anthropic (anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5 -- site ROOT path, on-page 'September 22, 2026') + platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/pricing.md (Opus 5.5 rows, fast-mode table, 0.05x cache footnote) + models/overview.md (1M context, Jun 2026 cutoffs, platform IDs) -- all fetched 2026-09-28 via curl with browser UA
Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.