Anthropic to Remove Claude Haiku 4.5 from Model Options in October

AI company Anthropic announced on October 15 that Claude Haiku 4.5 will be removed from model selection in its Free, Pro, and Max plans starting October 29, 2026. The removal applies to regular chat functions across web, desktop, and mobile interfaces, as well as Claude Cowork and Claude Design features.

Users can still access Haiku 4.5 under the "More models" option until October 29. After this date, the model will disappear from the list. If a user's active chat is using Haiku 4.5 at the time of removal, Claude will automatically switch the conversation to Haiku 5.5.

This change does not impact the availability of Haiku 4.5 for users on Claude Code, Team, and Enterprise plans, nor for developers using the Claude Platform via API. These groups will continue to have access to Haiku 4.5 as before.

Anthropic confirmed that existing Haiku 4.5 conversations will not be deleted. When users resume these conversations after October 29, responses will be generated by Haiku 5.5, though users can switch to other models within the chat. Users can export their chat history using Claude's data export function if they wish to retain copies.

Haiku 5.5, released on October 7, 2026, is the first in the Haiku series to support adjustable "thinking" levels and features a one million token context window. It offers significant improvements in coding and agent tasks compared to Haiku 4.5. Anthropic states Haiku 5.5 runs approximately 75% cheaper than Haiku 4.5 on average, with cost reductions up to 90% for prompts under 100,000 tokens, which constitute about 90% of Haiku series requests.