Anthropic on Wednesday launched Claude Haiku 5.5, the third model in its Claude 5.5 family in the past month, expanding its AI lineup ahead of a planned IPO. The company calls it the cheapest, fastest, and most capable small model it has ever released — and says it costs roughly 75% less to run than its predecessor, Haiku 4.5.
Built for volume, priced to undercut
Haiku 5.5 is aimed at high-volume, cost-sensitive work: classification, summarization, and data extraction, including live customer support, voice agents, and in-app assistants. Reuters reported pricing of $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for shorter prompts — rising to $0.50 and $2.50 respectively for longer ones — though some AI trackers note Anthropic itself has not yet published official per-token pricing, and the figures first surfaced in an unconfirmed online thread. For context, Haiku 4.5's documented rates are $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens.
Safety first for the small model
Notably, Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's first Haiku model with built-in safeguards for a narrow set of high-risk cybersecurity requests. The company says most everyday tasks will not be affected — a signal that even its cheapest tier is being hardened as AI agents take on more autonomous work.
An AI price war in full swing
The launch caps a frantic month in the AI race. Anthropic debuted its flagship Claude Opus 5.5 in late September, and OpenAI answered the same afternoon with two new GPT-6 models at half the cost of their predecessors. This week, France's Mistral also released a public preview of Mistral Large 4, its largest open-weight model yet, as Europe pushes for AI sovereignty. With an IPO on the horizon, Anthropic is clearly racing to own the economics of AI — not just the benchmarks.
The takeaway: raw model intelligence is no longer the only battleground. As businesses deploy AI agents at scale, the winner may be whoever delivers the most useful work per dollar — and Haiku 5.5 is Anthropic's sharpest bid yet.
Watch: YouTube explainers on the Claude Haiku 5.5 launch and what it means for developers
Music in this post's reel: Kevin MacLeod - Electrodoodle (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0