Anthropic Slashes Claude Haiku 5.5 Price 75% Amid IPO Criticism

On October 7, Anthropic launched Claude Haiku 5.5, with pricing roughly 75% below the average for Haiku 4.5.

Anthropic keeps rolling out new models ahead of its long-awaited IPO. Yet New Constructs has described the planned listing as the "most ridiculous IPO of 2026."

Claude Haiku 5.5 Arrives 9 Days After Sonnet 5.5

As the third Claude 5.5 model, Haiku 5.5 appeared nine days after Anthropic released Sonnet 5.5 on September 28. The model targets high-volume tasks like summaries, classification, browser use, and subagent functions.

For prompts up to 100,000 tokens, input is $0.10 per million tokens and output is $0.50 per million, representing a 90% drop from Haiku 4.5. Anthropic says those prompts made up about 90% of requests to the previous Haiku model.

Above that threshold, both rates multiply by five. Anthropic also halved Sonnet 5.5 cache-read prices, stating that most agentic work now costs about 20% less.

Artificial Analysis scored Haiku 5.5 at 43 on its Intelligence Index, up 26 points from the last Haiku. At max effort, that surpasses GPT-6 Luna's 38 and Gemini 3.8 Flash's 41 but falls 13 points short of Sonnet 5.5.

The same benchmark showed Haiku 5.5 using roughly 162,000 output tokens per task at max effort, about three times as many as GPT-6 Luna.

Terminal-Bench 4.0 results differed depending on the tester: Anthropic reports 39.2%, while Artificial Analysis measured 33%.

Can $4.6 Billion in Revenue Support a $2 Trillion Valuation?

While Anthropic expands its Claude lineup, its upcoming Nasdaq IPO is drawing criticism from New Constructs. The firm recently valued Anthropic at $150 billion, compared with a reported $2 trillion target.

New Constructs estimates that hitting that target would require twice Nvidia's trailing profit. Nvidia's net income topped $190 billion over the past four quarters.

Reuters reported Anthropic had $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue and a $42 billion net loss. New Constructs cited those losses and growing open-source competition in its verdict.

“We don’t think Anthropic has a viable business,” it said.

Founder David Trainer's firm flagged WeWork in 2019, six weeks before it withdrew its IPO. In 2020 it picked DoorDash, which now has a market cap of $83 billion.

Michael Burry also questioned the valuation, saying it could buy 78 S&P 500 companies. Anthropic hasn't published its prospectus yet. The public S-1 will be the first real test of those reported numbers.