Anthropic Slashes Claude Sonnet 5.5 Cache-Read Cost by 50%

Anthropic on October 7, 2026, lowered the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 by 50%, from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens, effective immediately. The company also introduced a monthly Claude Platform API credit for Max and Team subscribers: $100 per month for Max 5x, $200 per month for Max 20x, and up to $500 per month pooled across users on Team plans.

Both changes were announced alongside the launch of Claude Haiku 5.5, the company’s new small model, in the “Further updates” section of the Claude Haiku 5.5 announcement. Anthropic described the moves as improvements to the value of its models and products. The reduction applies to cache reads, the tokens billed when a subsequent API request retrieves previously cached content.

Cache reads on Sonnet 5.5 now cost $0.10 per million tokens rather than $0.20. Because cache reads make up a large share of models’ token consumption, Anthropic said, the change reduces the cost of running Sonnet 5.5 on most agentic tasks by around 20%. The company illustrated the shift with a Terminal-Bench 4.0 chart plotting Sonnet…