Anthropic Releases Claude Haiku 5.5 with Price Cuts and Updated Tokenizer
Anthropic has introduced Claude Haiku 5.5, lowering entry pricing to $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts under 100,000 tokens to match OpenAI's low-cost models. The new model enforces built-in reasoning steps and delivers significantly improved SVG generation capabilities. This release escalates competition in the budget LLM tier, making high-volume, low-latency reasoning workloads vastly more affordable for developers. However, the model's steep price increase beyond 100,000 tokens highlights a shift toward dynamic pricing based on context window size. Haiku 5.5 features a new tokenizer that processes identical text into roughly 1.25 times as many tokens compared to Haiku 4.5, resulting in a subtle price bump. Additionally, exceeding 100,000 tokens triggers a 5x price jump to $0.50/$2.50 per million tokens.
## BACKGROUND
In large language models, a tokenizer is a preprocessing tool that converts raw text into numerical sequences called tokens, which are used to measure input size and compute API usage costs. Pricing for LLM APIs is typically billed per million tokens split between prompt input and generated output.