Anthropic's fastest, cheapest Claude — 1M-token context, vision, tool use and adaptive thinking, built for high-volume agent work.
curl https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "claude-haiku-5-5",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Explain quantum tunneling simply." }]
}'Overview
Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's fastest and most cost-efficient small model, released on October 7, 2026. Built for high-volume, latency-sensitive work — classification, extraction, routing, and subagent tasks — it combines a 1M-token context window with vision, tool use, reasoning, and web search at a fraction of its predecessor's cost.
On Venice, Claude Haiku 5.5 runs under the anonymized privacy tier: your prompts are not stored, profiled, or used for training — a meaningful difference from the Big-Tech default of logging every API call. You pay per token with no subscription, and the full capability set (vision, function calling, web search, structured output) is available through the Venice app or the OpenAI-compatible API. One honest caveat: this tier is anonymized but not end-to-end encrypted or TEE-isolated, so Venice can serve the model but cannot read your prompts into any lasting record.
Agent quickstart
The API is OpenAI-compatible: change the base URL and the model id and existing client code works unchanged.
curl https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "claude-haiku-5-5",
"stream": true,
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Draft the release note." }]
}'curl https://api.venice.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $VENICE_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"model": "claude-haiku-5-5",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Find the rate limits." }],
"tools": [{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "search_docs",
"description": "Search the API documentation.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": { "query": { "type": "string" } },
"required": ["query"]
}
}
}],
"tool_choice": "auto"
}'import os
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
api_key=os.environ["VENICE_API_KEY"],
base_url="https://api.venice.ai/api/v1",
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="claude-haiku-5-5",
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Build without permission."}],
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)Specifications
Assessment
Use cases
Prompting
Set the effort parameter deliberately: low or medium for routing and classification, high only for genuinely hard subagent reasoning — it directly trades quality against speed and cost.
End every messages array with a user turn — assistant prefill now returns an error, so restructure prompts that relied on it.
Omit temperature, top_p, and top_k entirely; non-default sampling parameters return errors on this model.
Cache your system prompt and few-shot examples — cached input on Venice bills at $0.01 per 1M tokens versus $0.13 uncached.
Batch multiple screenshots or documents into one prompt; multiple image inputs are supported and beat sequential calls on both latency and price.
Budget tokens with the new tokenizer in mind: the same text counts roughly 30% more tokens than on Haiku 4.5, so recheck prompts sitting near context or cost thresholds.
Alternatives
| Model | Best for | Context | Open weights | Price (Venice) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | High-volume, latency-sensitive agent work | 1M tokens | No | $0.13 in · $0.63 out / 1M |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | Fast everyday multimodal tasks | 1M tokens | No | $0.94 in · $4.69 out / 1M |
| Qwen 3.7 Plus | Budget long-context chat | 1M tokens | No | $0.50 in · $2 out / 1M |
| Kimi K3 | Open-weight long-context reasoning | 1M tokens | Yes | $3.75 in · $18.75 out / 1M |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | Heavy agentic coding | 1M tokens | No | $3.60 in · $18 out / 1M |
Claude Haiku 5.5 is the right pick when you need Claude-grade instruction-following and agent behavior at the lowest per-token price on Venice — classification, extraction, routing, and subagent loops at volume. For complex agentic coding, step up to Sonnet or Opus; for open weights, Kimi K3 is the alternative.
Pricing
Billed per token on Venice: $0.13 per 1M input tokens and $0.63 per 1M output tokens.
New Venice accounts include a free daily allowance and 500 welcome credits — no credit card required.
Getting a key
Create a key in API settings. Nothing else is required to start.
Export it as VENICE_API_KEY so the snippets above run unedited.
Point an existing OpenAI client at https://api.venice.ai/api/v1. The scheme is part of the value: an OpenAI client given a bare host does not resolve it.
Pass claude-haiku-5-5 as the model and send the request.
FAQ
Claude Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's fastest and cheapest small model, released October 7, 2026. It targets high-volume, latency-sensitive work — classification, extraction, routing, summaries, and subagent tasks — with a 1M-token context window, 128K max output, vision, tool use, adaptive thinking, and web search.
Venice bills Claude Haiku 5.5 per token: $0.13 per 1M input tokens, $0.63 per 1M output tokens, and just $0.01 per 1M cached input tokens. There is no subscription required — you pay only for what you use.
You can try Claude Haiku 5.5 on Venice without a subscription; Venice's free daily prompt allowance covers text models, and heavier usage is billed per token in credits. Check your account's current daily allowance for exact numbers.
No. Claude Haiku 5.5 is proprietary to Anthropic with no open weights, so it cannot be self-hosted or fine-tuned. If open weights matter, Kimi K3 (1M context) or Google Gemma 4 31B Instruct on Venice are the closest alternatives.
Yes to both. Claude Haiku 5.5 supports function calling, structured JSON output, vision with multiple image inputs per prompt, web search, and dedicated browser-use and computer-use toolsets — the full agentic stack, unusual at this price tier.
No. Unlike Venice's open-weight models, Claude Haiku 5.5 runs Anthropic's safety classifiers and can decline requests with a refusal stop reason. If you need an uncensored model, pick one of Venice's open or uncensored options instead.
Both are fast 1M-context models, but Claude Haiku 5.5 is significantly cheaper on Venice ($0.13/$0.63 versus $0.94/$4.69 per 1M tokens) and stronger on agent benchmarks. Gemini 3.8 Flash makes sense if you're already invested in Google's tooling; for cost-sensitive volume work, Haiku wins.
Venice runs it under the anonymized privacy tier: prompts are not stored, profiled, or used for training, and nothing ties your usage to a personal history. Note this tier is anonymized rather than end-to-end encrypted or TEE-isolated — Venice's open-weight models offer the strongest hardware-level isolation.
Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 on October 7, 2026, and Venice listed it the same day. It succeeds Claude Haiku 4.5 (October 2025) as the third Haiku-class generation.
One key, free to start, no credit card.