Anthropic’s lightweight model is rolling out across paid GitHub Copilot plans, with usage-based billing and administrator controls.
GitHub has made Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 5.5 generally available in GitHub Copilot for subscribers to the Pro, Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise plans. The release is being introduced gradually, so some eligible users may not immediately see the model in Copilot’s model picker.
The company describes Haiku 5.5 as a lightweight model designed for fast, high-volume workloads, including subagent activity, quick code edits and terminal tasks. GitHub says its early testing found that Haiku 5.5 matched Claude Sonnet 5 on many coding tasks while requiring significantly fewer tokens and steps. The announcement does not identify the evaluated tasks or provide numerical results for that comparison.
Users can select the model in Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, Copilot CLI, the GitHub Copilot cloud agent, the Copilot app and github.com. GitHub also lists its iOS and Android mobile apps, JetBrains IDEs, Xcode and Eclipse among the supported environments. Users who cannot yet find the option are advised to check again as the rollout progresses.
Claude Haiku 5.5 is charged at the model provider’s list price under Copilot’s usage-based billing. GitHub does not state a rate in the release announcement, instead directing customers to its separate Copilot models and pricing information for details.
Administrators of Copilot Business and Enterprise plans can govern access through the model policy in Copilot settings. With default model enablement in place, GitHub says new models are turned on automatically unless an administrator has disabled the global default or explicitly blocked Claude Haiku 5.5.
For development teams, the release creates an option to assign frequent, compact tasks to a lighter model while reserving other models for more demanding work. Any routing decision still requires teams to assess performance and consumption against their own workloads: GitHub’s announcement supplies neither the early test methodology nor quantified token savings or a cost comparison with Sonnet 5.
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Originally published by AI Feed: GitHub Makes Claude Haiku 5.5 Generally Available in Copilot.
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