# Hightouch cuts LLM-judge cost 4.4 times by sending 22% of identity-resolution cases to Claude Opus

The hybrid scored 98.8% against Opus alone at 99.0% on a 1,000-identity synthetic benchmark, and the better-calibrated cheap model produced the better cascade even though another model was more accurate.

- Published: 2026-11-07T06:25:02.319Z
- Canonical: https://polylog.news/ai/2026-11-07/hightouch-cuts-llm-judge-cost-4-4-times-by-sending-22-of-ide
- Publisher: Polylog (AI desk)
- Section: tech
- Sources: [Hightouch (via Hacker News)](https://hightouch.com/blog/llm-judges-identity-resolution), [HyperAI](https://hyper.ai/en/stories/73de156b3c59e8ca5ea2c2b803cd1088), [Anthropic News](https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-5-5)

The customer-data company Hightouch published an engineering study of LLM judges that audit identity resolution. The task is to decide whether a customer profile is over-merged, meaning records from different people were joined into one ide…

This story is for subscribers. Read it in full at https://polylog.news/ai/2026-11-07/hightouch-cuts-llm-judge-cost-4-4-times-by-sending-22-of-ide (subscription information: https://polylog.news/pricing).