Anthropic's Claude Haiku 5.5 matches GPT-6 Luna on price

Anthropic's previous Haiku, 4.5, had grown expensive over its almost year on the market, priced at $1/$5 per million tokens and 10x the cost of OpenAI's GPT-6 Luna. The new Haiku 5.5 closes that gap by matching Luna's $0.10/$0.50 price up to 100,000 tokens. However, Haiku 5.5 uses a less generous tokenizer, so the same prompt consumes around 1.25x as many tokens as with Haiku 4.5 — a hidden increase that partially offsets the headline price cut.

Alongside the model, Anthropic halved the price of cache reads for Sonnet 5.5 and introduced monthly API credits for Max and Team subscribers. The credits exactly match the cost of the subscription itself, and users can disable auto-reload so API requests stop when the balance runs out, avoiding billing surprises. This brings Anthropic closer to OpenAI's offer of using a Codex subscription for personal API use, which remains a better deal for heavy API users.

The outcome hinges on how customers weigh benchmark performance against total token costs. For workloads under 100,000 tokens, Haiku 5.5 appears to offer better value than Luna at the same price, while above that threshold Luna becomes cheaper. Whether the tokenizer change erodes the price advantage for typical users remains an open question.