Haiku 5.5: the price changes at 100K

Transcript

The original narration, preserved as published. Relative dates refer to the episode’s coverage window.

Ten cents for a million input tokens. That's Haiku five point five's starting API rate. Anthropic released it yesterday, October seventh. But there's a pricing boundary worth knowing.

For prompts up to a hundred thousand tokens, input is ten cents per million and output is fifty cents. Above that prompt length, the rates rise to fifty cents and two dollars fifty.

This is aimed at work you repeat: extracting a field, classifying a request, or writing a short summary. Small savings can add up when those tasks run constantly.

It's also the first Haiku with adjustable effort. Adaptive thinking is on by default. Turning effort down can reduce thinking on simpler jobs; it doesn't promise the same result.

Migration needs more than a model name. The tokenizer counts the same text differently, so recount your prompts. The migration guide also calls for removing the old sampling settings.

Haiku is available now, including through the Claude API. Anthropic still recommends larger models for complex agentic coding. Put Haiku on a narrow task, then compare errors, time, and total cost.