IT Home October 17 news: Anthropic announced on local time on October 15 that, starting from October 29, 2026, Claude Haiku 4.5 will be removed from the model selector for Free, Pro, and Max plans. This applies to regular chat on web, desktop, and mobile devices, as well as Claude Cowork and Claude Design features.
Before October 29, users can still select Haiku 4.5 through the “More models” option in the model selector; after that date, this entry will disappear from the list. If the user is currently selecting Haiku 4.5, Claude will automatically switch it to Haiku 5.5.
This adjustment does not affect the availability of Haiku 4.5 in the Claude Code, Team, and Enterprise plans, as well as in the Claude Platform (API). The Team and Enterprise plans, and developers who use Haiku 4.5 through the Anthropic API, are not impacted by this change.
For users' existing Haiku 4.5 conversations, Anthropic explicitly will not delete any content. After October 29, when these conversations are reopened and continued to be entered, the replies will be generated by Haiku 5.5, and users can still switch to other models at any time in the conversation. If you need to keep a copy of the chat, you can obtain it via Claude's data export function at any time.
According to previous reports by IT Home, Haiku 5.5 was officially released on October 7, 2026. It is the first model in the Haiku series that supports a customizable level of thinking. The context window has been expanded to 1 million tokens, and the maximum output has increased to 128K tokens. Its performance in coding and AI tasks has improved significantly compared to Haiku 4.5.
In terms of price, Anthropic states that the average operating cost of Haiku 5.5 is approximately 75% lower than that of Haiku 4.5. For prompts that do not exceed 100,000 tokens, the cost reduction can reach 90%, and about 90% of the previous requests from the Haiku series fall within this length range.