A new low-cost Claude model, an updated Anthropic usage policy and a concrete schedule for WordPress 7.2: this week was lighter on headlines than the last one, but there is plenty to plan around. Here is what matters for business owners.
AI
Claude Haiku 5.5 launches with much lower prices
On October 7, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5 (model ID claude-haiku-5-5), which it calls its cheapest, fastest and most capable small model. It is aimed at high-volume work such as summaries, classification and database queries, and it is the first Haiku-class model with an adjustable effort setting. Anthropic lists prices of $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens for prompts up to 100k tokens (longer prompts cost $0.50 input and $2.50 output), and says this is about 75% less to run on average than Haiku 4.5. Anthropic also halved the cache-read price of Sonnet 5.5 from $0.20 to $0.10 per million tokens. The company says Sonnet 5.5 and Opus 5.5 remain the better choice for complex agentic coding. What this means for you: routine automations such as ticket triage, document classification or summarising e-mails can become noticeably cheaper, but the performance and savings figures are Anthropic's own, so test the model on your real data first. Source: Anthropic – Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5.
Anthropic updates its Usage Policy (effective November 12)
Anthropic announced on October 8 an updated Usage Policy that takes effect on November 12, 2026. It adds a consolidated section on deceptive campaigns and artificial activity (such as fake accounts), explicitly covers weapons software, and gets more specific on surveillance: tracking people without consent is prohibited, and Claude may not be used to decide or recommend who to investigate, arrest or charge. For high-risk use cases the existing requirements stay in place (a qualified human in the loop and telling affected people that AI was used), and new rules apply when Claude controls hardware that can act physically. What this means for you: if you use Claude in customer-facing or HR-related workflows, review them against the new text before November 12 and document who reviews AI-assisted decisions. Source: Anthropic – 2026 Usage Policy update.
Odoo
Odoo Awards 2026 winners announced
Odoo published the winners of its 2026 partner awards on October 9. The ceremony took place at Brussels Expo on September 26. Among the winners, Consultoría Informática Studio73 was named Best Partner for Europe and Aureatic S.L.L. Best Starter for Europe, with further winners for the Americas, Africa, MENA, India and APAC. What this means for you: not a technical change, but a useful signal of which partners are active in the ecosystem. Beyond this post, we did not find new official release or technical announcements for Odoo in the last seven days, so it was a quiet week for the platform itself; our earlier Odoo 20 coverage still applies. Source: Odoo – Odoo Awards Winners 2026.
WordPress
WordPress 7.2 schedule officially confirmed
In our last post we reported the WordPress 7.2 dates based on secondary reporting. The core team's official release party schedule, published on October 6, confirms them and adds the full timeline: Beta 1 on October 20, 2026, weekly betas up to Beta 4 on November 10, Release Candidate 1 on November 17, RC 2 and RC 3 on November 24 and December 1, and the final release on December 8, 2026 (all at 15:00 UTC). What this means for you: from October 20 you can test your theme and plugins on a staging copy, which gives you several weeks to fix problems before the final release. Source: Make WordPress Core – WordPress 7.2 Release Party Schedule.
WordPress 7.2 turns off the NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES SQL mode
According to a developer note from October 9, WordPress 7.2 adds NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES to its list of unsupported SQL modes and removes it from its own database session. The server's global settings are not changed. The reason: WordPress escapes characters with backslashes, so queries can fail or return wrong data when a host enables this mode. Most sites will not notice a difference. Sites that really need the mode can keep it via the incompatible_sql_modes filter, which must be placed in a db.php drop-in because WordPress connects to the database before plugins load. What this means for you: if your host or a custom plugin relies on this mode, check it on staging before updating to 7.2. Source: Make WordPress Core – NO_BACKSLASH_ESCAPES.
Our take
Cheaper small models make routine AI automation easier to justify, but clear rules for human review matter just as much, especially with usage policies tightening. On the WordPress side, the published 7.2 schedule is a good cue to set up a staging site now. We can help with server setup, WordPress maintenance, Odoo and AI automation projects.