Claude Haiku 5.5 arrives with massive price cuts proving the AI pricing arms race is far from over
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Anthropic has released Claude Haiku 5.5, its fastest and most affordable small model designed for high-volume tasks such as data queries and customer support. The new model offers significant price reductions, costing approximately 75 percent less than Haiku 4.5 on average, with discounts reaching up to 90 percent for prompts under 100,000 tokens. Benchmark results demonstrate major performance improvements over the previous version, particularly in computer use and agentic coding capabilities. Haiku 5.5 also outperforms OpenAI's budget model GPT-6 Luna across all tested categories, although it still trails behind Anthropic's larger Sonnet 5.5 model. This release marks the first time a Haiku-class model allows users to adjust reasoning levels to balance cost against performance. In addition to the new model launch, Anthropic is cutting cache read costs for Sonnet 5.5 by half to remain competitive in the AI pricing arms race. The company is simultaneously introducing monthly API credits for subscribers and updating its software development kits with beta support for computer and browser use.
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