From TFA:

>> Claude Haiku 5.5, built for high-volume and cost-sensitive applications, will join the Claude 5.5 family in the coming weeks.

This will be interesting. While no one cared about small models in the last few months except for the OSS community, there is a silent small model revolution with gpt luna and jev. Headless/background llm routines are cost-feasible, which will of course lead to exponential usage and cost.

My take on anthropic is that haiku 5.5 has been shelfed for a while since it is predatory against sonnet (see terra 5.6 usage), but openai went kamikaze and they are now forced to release.

Nevertheless, the elephant in the room has grown: will any of the Labs be able to profit if mass adoption lies in the highly crowded small model territory?

https://openrouter.ai/blog/insights/gpt-5-6-discounts-jevons...