Invest2 publishersIndependently confirmed2 min readPublished
Anthropic cuts Haiku's price by 75% to match OpenAI's smallest model
Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 per million input tokens, 75% below Haiku 4.5, ahead of a planned IPO. Yahoo Finance reported the rate matches OpenAI's smallest model, giving buyers a matched quote before anyone can see what the cut costs Anthropic in margin.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Haiku 5.5 is the third model in Anthropic's Claude 5.5 family released in the past month.
- The low rate covers prompts under 100,000 tokens; longer prompts cost $0.50 per million input tokens and $2.50 per million output tokens.
- Anthropic built the model for classification, summarization and extraction, including live support, voice agents and in-app assistants.
- It is the first Haiku with built-in safeguards against a narrow set of high-risk cybersecurity requests, and Anthropic said most everyday tasks would not be affected.
- Anthropic lost $42 billion in 2025, according to the S-1 prospectus Reuters obtained.
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Why it matters
- decision Teams that run long documents through Haiku now have a pricing reason to split them into prompts under 100,000 tokens, since crossing that line multiplies both rates by five.
- precedent With Haiku 5.5 and GPT-6 Luna at matching list prices, a further cut by either vendor gives the other a direct reason to follow.
- exposure If the cut is a subsidy, the shareholders who buy into the IPO end up paying for cheaper tokens for enterprise customers.
Anthropic described the reduction as an average of 75% [2]. That means that on a blended basis Haiku 4.5 cost about four times as much as its replacement [10], and individual rates did not all fall by the same amount. Above the 100,000-token line both input and output cost five times the short-prompt rate [11]. In either tier an output token costs five times an input token [12].
The cut can be read three ways. If Haiku 5.5 is cheaper to serve than Haiku 4.5, Anthropic can charge a quarter of the old price [10] and keep its margin per token. If it is not, the cut buys volume ahead of an IPO expected before Thanksgiving [17]. And if most of the company's revenue comes from long prompts or from Sonnet and Opus, the models it sells for higher-level coding and enterprise work [6], the cut touches a small share of sales.
The second reading is the one the price-war argument needs. The S-1 Reuters obtained puts 2025 sales at $4.6 billion, up 12 times on the year [7]. Against that, the $42 billion loss [8] works out to about $9.13 for every dollar of revenue [13]. Sales the year before were roughly $383 million [14].
In my view the evidence supports the buyer side of that argument and not yet the vendor side. Enterprise customers are looking for ways to cut costs after what Yahoo Finance called the brief "tokenmaxxing" era of unfettered spending [18]. Some are turning to open-weight models from US and Chinese developers [16]. Neither report includes Anthropic's gross margin or its cost to serve a token, so nothing published links the 2025 loss to Haiku pricing.
What Anthropic is giving up is list price on its cheapest tier in the months before it asks public investors for money [17]. The margin-squeeze thesis would be confirmed if the prospectus shows gross margin falling in the quarters after cuts like this one. It would be wrong if cost per token fell as fast as price.
What to watch
- Any Sonnet or Opus price cut of similar size; that would carry the price war into the models Anthropic sells for enterprise and coding work.
- OpenAI's listing, reportedly delayed to early 2027, and whether its filing shows a loss ratio close to Anthropic's.