Anthropic and OpenAI reset the LLM price curve as Chinese models lose their old cost edge

Anthropic’s launch of Haiku 5.5 on Oct. 8 pushed short-request pricing down to $0.1 per million input tokens and $0.5 per million output tokens, a tenth of Haiku 4.5. That move landed the model on the low-cost edge of Artificial Analysis charts that, just months earlier, had been dominated by Chinese names such as MiMo, DeepSeek, MiniMax and GLM. According to the source article, the shift does more than rearrange benchmark plots: it shows that the low-price boundary Chinese model makers spent two years forcing into the global market is no longer theirs alone. The piece traces how DeepSeek’s 2024 pricing shocked the sector, how open-weight Chinese models spread through US startups and developer platforms, and why growing usage did not translate into equivalent revenue capture. It also details the response from OpenAI and Anthropic, including engineering-driven cost cuts, permanent low-price resets, API credits for subscribers, and the financial firepower behind those decisions. The result, in the article’s framing, is a new phase of competition where low price is still necessary, but no longer a moat that Chinese model vendors can claim by themselves.