Claude Haiku 5.5 vs Muse Spark Open

Claude Haiku 5.5 is a proprietary multimodal language model from Anthropic and the smallest member of the Claude 5.5 family, released on October 7, 2026 after Claude Opus 5.5 and Claude Sonnet 5.5. It accepts text and image input and returns text, with a 1M token context window and up to 128K output tokens per request. It is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort parameter: adaptive thinking is on by default and the model decides how much to reason, steered by effort levels from low to max with medium as the default. Its training data cutoff is June 2026. Pricing starts at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100K tokens, which Anthropic reports is about 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests in that range.

Anthropic positions Haiku 5.5 for high-volume, latency-sensitive work such as classification, extraction, routing, summarization, and subagent tasks, and describes it as its fastest model to date at standard speed. It uses the same tokenizer as Claude Opus 4.7 and later models, so the same text counts as roughly 30% more tokens than on Haiku 4.5.

Muse Spark Open is an open-weight multimodal model released by Meta on October 15, 2026. Its sparse mixture-of-experts architecture has 816 billion total parameters and activates 42 billion per token. It accepts text, images, audio and video, produces text, and supports a context window of 1,048,576 tokens. Meta provides BF16 and NVFP4 checkpoints for self-hosting, alongside access through hosted inference partners.

The model is designed for coding, tool use and multi-step reasoning over long tasks. Its visual inputs support workflows involving screenshots, documents and other image content. Vision Evals measures its text understanding, counting, identification, reasoning and object detection at Low and High effort. The published weights use the custom Muse Model License, with commercial use subject to its terms and the accompanying usage policy.