Claude Opus 5.5 vs Claude Haiku 5.5
Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on the Models at Work leaderboard (91 vs 74 out of 100). Claude Haiku 5.5 is about 40× cheaper per blended million tokens ($0.20 vs $8). On Artificial Analysis' independent Intelligence Index, Claude Opus 5.5 leads 58 to 43.
| Claude Opus 5.5 · Anthropic | Claude Haiku 5.5 · Anthropic | |
|---|---|---|
| Leaderboard rank | #1 | #7 |
| Score (0–100) | 91 | 74 |
| Tier | Frontier | Fast and cheap |
| Price per 1M tokens | $4 in · $20 out | $0.10 in · $0.50 out |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Open weights | No | No |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index | 58 | 43 |
| Arena text score | 1507 | — |
| Humanity's Last Exam, Diamond (Scale) | 55.0 | — |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 167 | — |
| Best for | Agentic coding, Long-running agents, Enterprise knowledge work | Classification and extraction, Routing tiers, Latency-sensitive paths |
Choose Claude Opus 5.5 if…
- you need agentic coding
- you need long-running agents
- you need enterprise knowledge work
The model people actually ship agents on: top of the independent index, a price that does not need a budget meeting, and a community that complains mainly about how much it has to be used.
Caveats: Arena puts Gemini 4 Argon ahead on chat preference; the gap is inside two scores' error bars.
Choose Claude Haiku 5.5 if…
- you need classification and extraction
- you need routing tiers
- you need latency-sensitive paths
Ten cents a million and, per the people using it, smarter than the other ten-cent model; mind the 100K cliff.
Caveats: Price jumps five-fold above 100K input tokens, which commenters call an absurdly low cutoff for agent runs.
What practitioners say
Claude Opus 5.5: The launch thread was the biggest Claude thread of the year on Hacker News, a port of the TypeScript compiler to Rust credited the model with a working build in ten hours, and a Vals AI materials-discovery run used it for agentic simulation. A 'has it been nerfed yet' tracker is the most-upvoted scepticism.
Claude Haiku 5.5: The thread had over a thousand points in a day; the recurring reports are near-perfect structured classification in production and 'noticeably smarter than GPT-6 Luna', against complaints about the 100K pricing tier.
Questions people ask
Which is better, Claude Opus 5.5 or Claude Haiku 5.5?
Claude Opus 5.5 scores higher on the Models at Work leaderboard (91 vs 74 out of 100). Claude Haiku 5.5 is about 40× cheaper per blended million tokens ($0.20 vs $8). On Artificial Analysis' independent Intelligence Index, Claude Opus 5.5 leads 58 to 43.
When should I choose Claude Opus 5.5 over Claude Haiku 5.5?
Choose Claude Opus 5.5 for agentic coding, long-running agents, enterprise knowledge work. The model people actually ship agents on: top of the independent index, a price that does not need a budget meeting, and a community that complains mainly about how much it has to be used.
When should I choose Claude Haiku 5.5 over Claude Opus 5.5?
Choose Claude Haiku 5.5 for classification and extraction, routing tiers, latency-sensitive paths. Ten cents a million and, per the people using it, smarter than the other ten-cent model; mind the 100K cliff.
Which is cheaper, Claude Opus 5.5 or Claude Haiku 5.5?
Claude Opus 5.5 costs $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output tokens on Anthropic's list price (Claude pricing, read Oct 10, 2026). Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens on Anthropic's list price (Claude pricing, read Oct 10, 2026).
Scores come from the Models at Work leaderboard: Score is 0 to 100: 50% independent evals normalised within this table, 20% price-performance, 15% practitioner sentiment from Signals and community threads, 15% operational fit (context, speed, availability, open weights). Models within three points are a tie in practice. Vendor-published figures are labelled as such and never counted as independent. Prices are vendor list prices where published; blended figures assume three input tokens per output token.