Claude Haiku 5.5 arrives with massive price cuts proving the AI pricing arms race is far from over

Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, the company's fastest and most affordable small model to date. Benchmark results show a major performance jump over its predecessor, and Anthropic is also cutting prices for Sonnet 5.5. Haiku 5.5 is designed for high-volume, cost-sensitive tasks like summarization, database queries, classification, and live customer support, according to Anthropic. On average, the model costs about 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5.

For requests with prompts up to 100,000 tokens, which Anthropic says account for roughly 90 percent of all previous Haiku requests, prices drop by up to 90 percent. Prompts longer than 100,000 tokens cost five times as much. Anthropic points out that Haiku 5.5 uses an updated tokenizer that consumes slightly more tokens per task than its predecessor. The same thing happened with the Opus 4.x models, where token usage jumped about 30 percent from the tokenizer change alone.

Real-world savings are likely smaller than the per-token…