Anthropic to retire Haiku 4.5 soon: The price of the cheap model may rise

Anthropic has planned to retire its small and cheap AI model Claude Haiku 4.5 no earlier than October 15, 2026. That's according to an analysis by Yahoo Finance. The date pressures the company to decide what a successor should cost.

The story is therefore not about ordinary Claude subscriptions suddenly becoming more expensive. It is about the price for developers and companies that build services on top of Claude.

What is at stake?

Haiku is Anthropic's smallest and fastest model. It is used for simple, repetitive tasks, such as sorting inquiries or extracting data from documents. Today, Haiku 4.5 costs 1 dollar per million tokens in and 5 dollars out. Tokens are the small chunks of text that AI models calculate and bill in.

The analysis suggests that a successor, referred to as Haiku 5.5, could cost 2 dollars in and 10 dollars out. That is a doubling. However, this is an assessment of what Anthropic might do. It is not an announced price.

Why does the price matter?

If a company runs millions of small AI tasks, the difference between 1 and 2 dollars quickly becomes large. The Yahoo article writes that the difference is "a fundamental constraint on whether automated systems can pay off."

The competitors are already at the higher level. According to the article, comparable models from OpenAI and Google cost 2 dollars and 10 dollars. Open models, which anyone can download and run themselves, cost on average around 0.83 dollars per million tokens.

Anthropic is in a squeeze

Anthropic has large expenses. According to the article, the company's listing document (S-1) shows 518 billion dollars in commitments to computing power and 42 billion dollars in losses. That gives a motive to raise prices.

At the same time, a higher price may lead developers to switch to cheaper, open models.

What does it mean for you?

If you use Claude as an ordinary customer, you are unlikely to notice anything directly. If, on the other hand, your workplace depends on services that use Claude in the background, a higher price may eventually lead to more expensive products. If you own solutions built on Haiku 4.5 yourselves, you should expect to have to switch models and check the price as the date approaches.