Low messes up the bicycle frame, but medium/high/xhigh/max all get the bicycle frame right.
The max one took 5 minutes 9 seconds and cost 3.3826 cents. The cheapest one (low) cost 0.0936 cents and took 7 seconds.
The most recent release of my llm-anthropic plugin queries the Anthropic model listing API directly, so I didn't have to upgrade the plugin to add support for this model:
llm install llm-anthropic -U
llm anthropic refresh
llm -m claude-haiku-5.5 'prompt goes here'
> "What's up with the pelican?"
Well you see in the early days of LLMs we wanted a fun way to test new models, and there was this blog, ...
Even more so, because in a lot of their benchmarks they use the max models. I honestly think I'd rather these labs use their xhigh models as the default for benchmarking instead since I don't think the average person is even using max.
The pelicans all start to look the same after a while.
But seeing the comparison to other models by class, family, or historical progression gives an excellent frame of reference.
Here's the Haiku 4.5 pelican from a year ago - it sucked in comparison to Haiku 5.5: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/15/claude-haiku-45/
Here's a Blender model I had Claude Opus 5.5 create: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blender-viewer?url=https%3A%...
And here's some animated pixel art by Opus 5.5: https://tools.simonwillison.net/kakapo-party
And some Monkey Island style music (Opus can compose music too): https://tools.simonwillison.net/scrimshaw-jukebox
Anthropic's models do all of this by outputting code. GPT-6 Astra has similar capabilities - I got this Blender model using that: https://tools.simonwillison.net/blender-viewer?url=https%3A%...
They are still not great at SVG. I just asked Opus and Fable to add a background to an SVG and the results were, well, not great.
This creates Sierra AGI-style adventure game scenes painted live from simple Turtle-esque drawing instructions so you can basically provide it an empty canvas and then position text labels on the canvas where you want certain things (tavern, oak tree, etc) and it will generate a custom script for rendering them in a EGA graphics style.
Please don't judge me too harshly for this particular poop video. But here is an example of something 100% generated with claude prompts only.
Input
$0.10 / MTok for prompts up to 100,000 tokens
$0.50 / MTok for prompts over 100,000 tokens
Output
$0.50 / MTok for prompts up to 100,000 tokens
$2.50 / MTok for prompts over 100,000 tokens
In both cases, still much cheaper than Haiku 4.5's $1 input / $5 output and these prices better compete with GPT-6 Luna. ($0.10 input / $0.50 output, but with no token threshold [EDIT: the threshold for Luna is apparently 272k])
For a while Anthropic has lacked a cost effective “cheap” LLM for summarisation, compacting, RAG helpers, etc.
These ‘ephemeral’ workloads are often under 100k tokens, or can be structured to be under 100k.
In some coding benchmarks, Haiku 5.5 beats Sonnet 5! (Especially implementation; do a well defined Jira ticket; etc), it’s really impressive how much intelligence per dollar has grown in just a few short months.
Open weights models giving a distant salute from afar
You can test with Anthropic's count_tokens endpoint or with https://crates.io/crates/tokwc
So, it is might be even worse.
Neither encode nor decode are linear in compute, so providers need to price for average expected length.
This is just getting closer to the true cost of generating tokens.
From OpenAI's website: Prompts with more than 272K input tokens are priced at 2x input and cache rates and 1.5x output for the full request.
Fixed.
The benchmark in the article showed it as lower per completed task than luna, but I guess we'll find out how representative that is. Anthropic has generally been fairly honest in their benchmarking though.
For this application 100K token input is plenty.
Of course Anthropic and OpenAI, both at $0.10/M, are still 2.5x the cost of Jev's $0.04/M.
For other tasks like summaries (another suggested usage) it's good to see Haiku and Luna now competing against each other on cost.
I'd love to know how the business automation market breaks down by volume of call type though - hard to imagine that decision making (e.g. branching, triage) isn't a very large part of it, greater than these other suggested Haiku use cases.
I will try the new Haiku, but it would be worthwhile if Haiku could take sane instructions and do all file editing for Opus / Sonnet / Fable then it would be worth using.
Your vibes don't appear to be supported by facts. From the announcement:
>> Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests up to 100,000 tokens, and 50% lower for requests over 100,000 tokens. On Haiku 4.5, 90% of requests fell into the former category.
I'm asking to learn for a similar project, not to discount anything you're saying.
There are plenty of workflows like translations where you'd easily be under the cap.
And Opus 5.5 is really good.
This is a very big benefit for me. I can now ship actual ai enhanced features behind my subscription without paying extra or fully relying on on-device models. I do worry that this is to soften the blow for user-unfriendly changes
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
Being forced through the non-OSS Claude Code with all of its quirks and issues is... such an exhausting use of force by Anthropic.
To the extent that you _can_ choose to disable telemetry and training on your traces in CC, it's not all that obvious what they gain by crippling your ability to use the subscription with other – better – tools.
It's also remarkable that it's coincident with OpenAI adding "Sign in with OpenAI", so that you can use your tokens with other tools.
You might be right and they will change this in the future, but that's speculative
This text has replaced the entirety of the page called "Use the Claude Agent SDK with your Claude plan."
What more do you need?
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/headless
So, as written, yes.
This is more to encourage people to try out adding AI into their product, which is a totally different flow and experience from using AI to build the product.
That's 5-15 minutes of work at most. Not exactly the type of lock-in the parent is implying.
Of course, they don't do this out of pure kindness, but I really struggle to see a negative for subscribers already using a Claude Max subscription, especially given changing to another model is essentially frictionless via OpenRouter.
Compared with "Sign in via OpenAI" which they just announced, this is far less lock-in for anyone hosting services but less interesting for users of said services. With Anthropics approach, you can just use the allowance on your users however you see fit along with any other models and once it's used up, you can still just decide not to use their models for the remainder. With users bringing their tokens meanwhile, there is less flexibility in terms of switching for you, though might be cheaper for users.
Both interesting, each approaching this from a very different direction, each having their own trade-offs. On the OpenAI front, will be interesting whether developers can set specific temp, reasoning budgets, etc. for such "provided tokens" or whether OpenAI exposes that only via the actual API.
Anthropic isn't even close to being this useful.
Biggest loss is that Ant models look like they are genuinely better.
This changes on a weekly basis, I ended up with subscriptions to most of the providers (except for X.ai).
> Claude Haiku 5.5 is priced 90% lower than Claude Haiku 4.5 for requests up to 100,000 tokens, and 50% lower for requests over 100,000 tokens
Haiku and Luna now have the exact same price up to 100,000 tokens. Luna is now cheaper for anything after 100,000 tokens, even after Luna's own price increases at 270,000 it's still less than Haiku.
So it sounds like they've directly addressed that problem. Their self-reported benchmarks are all higher than Luna too.
Good to know that is going back to being an actual option from perf/price perspective.
Haiku 5.5: https://html.non.io/lcars-haiku-5.5/
Opus 5.5 for comparison: https://html.non.io/lcars-opus-5.5
Designs it was building from: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/5093e689-1e74-4f26-b632-2a4500f...
One interesting thing is it took a look at the job at hand, and immediately delegated it to Opus 5.5. It at least knows what it isn't good at. Very fast though, and likely best used for small subagent tasks / tightly scoped work.
Considering the price, no model comes close to being as good as this. However, it did take an extremely long time.
TIME 19m COST $0.16 https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/#claude-haiku-5-5
All results: https://jonclegg.github.io/pacman-bakeoff/
Hasn't this always been the case with Haiku?
It's meant to be a good test, not a good design.
Anthropic has really been doing all the right things in the past few weeks, while OpenAI continues to fumble the bag.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15036540-use-the-clau...
Wait what? This has gotten their blessing?
- https://blog.chrislewis.au/using-coding-agents-to-decompile-nintendo-64-games/
- https://blog.chrislewis.au/the-long-tail-of-llm-assisted-decompilation/
I could now one-shot a new game, yeah.
Like could total war become a browser game?
They often ship the original assets in a somewhat brazen disregard for basic copyright law even when the games are still for sale on places like GOG though.
As such, I do not need to even reach for Haiku, and 4.5 was so inaccurate that it often cost more to do so in the past. Sonnet 5.5/low has been good for this kind of thing, and i didn't even touch thinking tokens or any of that. Opus 5.5 low for questions/repros, medium for implementation, basically never reaching for anything above that anymore. 5.5 has been great, so I'll try Haiku, but don't see myself going out of my way to integrate it.