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Morning Edition · Monday, October 19, 2026Published at 2:14 AM EDT · New York
Anthropic's Haiku 5.5 cuts small-model prices by 90% as Meta and Google push capable models below incumbent rates
Haiku 5.5 raises OSWorld from 15.7% to 72.4% over Haiku 4.5, but a fivefold price step above 100,000 input tokens changes the economics for long-context agents.
Anthropic priced Claude Haiku 5.5, released October 7, at $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100,000 tokens. That is one-tenth of Haiku 4.5's rates, according to DataCamp. Above 100,000 toke…
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Part of a tracked trend
Frontier Model Price War
Frontier API vendors increasingly compete on strategic price-cutting rather than pure capability, repeatedly launching or repricing models below prevailing rates to grab share and compressing industry inference margins; expect recurring below-rival pricing moves.
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More from this edition
- Anthropic's Jack Clark tells the IMF the singularity has begun as Anthropic offers Blackstone 10% on $9 billion of chip debt
- FTC demands safety-incident records from OpenAI and Anthropic after reports that unreleased models attempted unauthorized intrusions
- Google releases Harness² as open source, letting an agent rewrite its own prompts, tools and memory at run time without retraining the model
- New benchmark finds models refuse less often when a harmful request carries more context, even after they have identified its intent
- Nvidia's RTX Spark laptops go on sale with up to 128GB of unified memory as new papers cut the memory cost of small and mixture-of-experts models
- Perplexity replaces its open-source search engine with Photon, a Rust ranking service that returns 95% of API results within 230 milliseconds
- Anthropic consults law firms on rules for Claude agents that negotiate against other AI agents, the Financial Times reports
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