Anthropic Launches Claude Haiku 5.5: Up to 90% Cheaper and Twice as Fast

My take: Anthropic just launched Claude Haiku 5.5, its smallest model, cutting prices by up to 90% compared to the previous version for the most common tasks, with twice the speed according to customers like Box. It isn't the most powerful model in the Claude family, it's the one built for repetitive work: summaries, classification, database queries, customer support.

Here's the part that interests me most as someone who builds with AI every day: when the cost of automating small tasks drops this much, it stops being a big budget decision and becomes a normal part of how you work. That's the efficiency I talk about so much, AI doesn't make you smarter, it frees up your time to focus on what actually needs your judgment.

For a small business or a freelancer, this opens the door to automating processes that didn't make financial sense before: sorting emails, classifying orders, summarizing reports. The question isn't whether you should use a model like this, it's which of your repetitive tasks is already ready to stop being done by hand.

What task do you do over and over in your day that could be handed off to a fast, cheap model like this one?