For those of us on subscription plans:

* From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost.

* On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window.

* After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

The "offer, then remove" aspect is a bit eyebrow-raising -- it feels like they are trying to get subscribers to switch to usage-based billing, which makes me wonder if we'll ever get it after that June 22nd window.

Pelican for Fable 5 on default settings is a clear improvement on Opus 4.8

Fable 5 default: https://gist.github.com/simonw/036bee5a703e7ec84e34efa974438...

Opus 4.8 (the "max" one is closest to Fable): https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/28/claude-opus-4-8/#and-s...

Now here are the Fable pelicans for all five of the thinking effort levels - low, medium, high, xhigh, max: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...

Low used 25 input, 1,929 output - 9.67 cents: https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=25&ot=1929&sel=claude-fable-5

Max used 25 input, 14,430 output - 72.175 cents! https://www.llm-prices.com/#it=25&ot=14430&sel=claude-fable-...

Not missing the forest for the trees, this effectively means in 3-5 months China will drop open source models that are every bit as capable and dangerous as current day Mythos except with no safeguards.

And the only companies safe from this are the large corporations that shook hands with Anthropic? Because Fable doesn't seem to have actual safeguards, more like 'if you talk about this you will be talking to Opus.' It doesn't guard against offensive use, it prevents all use (offensive AND defensive).

Rationalists are inventing oligopolies from first principles, absolutely incredible things happening in SF

> Distillation. We’ve previously identified large-scale attempts to extract (“distill”) Claude’s capabilities to train competing models in authoritarian countries.

Glad to hear the UK is finally making an effort to catch up on the AI front ;)

To hide the severity of the price increase, the plan is to move everyone right one model.

Haiku = essentially phased out Sonnet = the Haiku use cases Opus = the new Sonnet class Fable = the new Opus class

If I am right, the other "5.0" models will be conspicuously absent, possibly even for a couple of months. (If Opus 5 follows soon and is even modestly better than 4.8 then I was wrong.)

On the new FrontierCode [1] benchmark (ie graded from an OSS maintainer's perspective of "would I merge this code?")

- Opus 4.7 xhigh: 5.2%

- Opus 4.8 xhigh: 13.4%

- Fable 5 xhigh: 29.3%

Seems like a huge jump.

[1] https://cognition.ai/blog/frontier-code

I have been refactoring a project using Opus 4.7/4.8 for the past few weeks or so. I just decided to switch to Fable 5 max today. It stopped half way through and it just blocked me and switched back to Opus 4.8 automatically. "This model has specific safety measures that flagged something in this message. This sometimes happens with safe, normal conversations. Send feedback or learn more." I left feedback saying that their heuristics are too sensitive. For now I will not be using Fable 5.

[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15363606-why-claude-s...

At this point Anthropic is a pure marketing and PR company. Super catchy names like Opus, Mythos and Fable trying to get you to think that these software products are actually super-human life changing experiences. Boris Cherny coming to HN “Hi! it’s Boris from the Claude Code team” to get real tech people’s goodwill.

From Opus 4.6 there are no noticeable improvements for me in code generation. It works very well, till 90% completion, if you guide it correctly. And you need a little luck. For serious production code I need to understand what I’m doing so it helps a bit, sometimes.

The system card is 319 pages, at what point do we call it a "book" instead of a "card"?

There's a quote from a METR report on page 52:

>We ran [Mythos 5] on 38 of our hardest software tasks, including tasks centered around R&D. [Mythos5] generally outperformed an early checkpoint of Claude Mythos Preview in these, including by succeeding on some tasks that had not been solved by any public model we have previously evaluated. However, we still observed the model occasionally failing to correctly interpret nuanced instructions in difficult tasks... Based on the available evidence, we believe [Mythos 5] is likely unable to fully and reliably automate R&D for frontier projects spanning multiple weeks. We believe that a better, more confident assessment would require more time, evaluations, and information from the model developer.

From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost. On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window. After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

This seems like the pharmaceutical method of get them hooked on the drug with free samples, then once they can't live without it, raise the price. I'm not sure I want to start using Claude Fable on a max plan if it's just going to go away on June 23rd.

But maybe the more charitable reading is that they didn't have to offer this model at all on those plans and they are giving the standard free trial.

Impressions from testing Fable 5 prior to launch:

• My most noticeable immediate jump was in how its frontend design was much more intentionally crafted, almost like it had more of a human pro designer touch; with better end-user usability too.

• In some internal agentic harnesses, it achieved better results with about half the tokens, making it cost the ~same as Opus 4.8 price-wise! The real price increase is less than 2x; with biggest differences in harder problems where Opus 4.8 struggles (or needs many turns).

• Part of the token efficiency improvements come from it doing more targeted and surgical diffs, and less non-necessary changes. This is great, because PRs often have less LoC changes for review. It writes more maintainable code without explicit human steering.

• For general conversation and assistant style use cases, didn’t really notice a difference vs 4.8.

• 1M context window, without increased pricing for long context is AWESOME. This is a massive win.

• The classifiers are super aggressive and sensitive and this does happen for very benign, non-security coding tasks. Fallbacks to 4.8 worked like a charm; but the filters are definitely super sensitive.

Overall, I would describe this as a step change and worthy of the "Claude 5" model name. It did take some time to understand the intelligence ceiling of this model; and even with an extended testing window I'm still discovering new things and often surprised (in a good way) by the model.

I have been refactoring a project using Opus 4.8 for the last week or so. I just decided to switch to Fable 5 max. It stopped half way through and it just blocked me and switched back to Opus 4.8 automatically. "This model has specific safety measures that flagged something in this message. This sometimes happens with safe, normal conversations. Send feedback or learn more." I left feedback saying that their heuristics are too sensitive. For now I will not be using Fable 5.

[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15363606-why-claude-s...

> To ensure we’re responsibly deploying Mythos-class models, we are requiring limited data retention and review as part of our safety work. Prompts submitted to, and outputs generated by, Mythos-class models are retained for 30 days for trust and safety purposes, on every platform where these models are offered. [1]

[1] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15425996-data-retenti...

> A new data retention policy Finally, we’re making a change to the way we handle business customer data for Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models with similar or higher capability levels. We will require 30-day retention for all traffic on Mythos-class models, on both first- and third-party surfaces. We won’t use this data to train new Claude models, or for any non-safety-related purpose, and we’ve instituted new privacy protections including logging all human access to the data and ensuring its deletion after 30 days in almost all cases ...

Very interesting. I am not sure this will comply with organizational policies and standards protocols (HIPPA etc.,)

Careful using this with Cursor, especially for corp use. Anthropic will "retain agent request and output data associated with this model, regardless of you Cursor Privacy Mode setting."

Trying to implement a GPU driver, but the Unigine Superposition benchmark crashes. It tried to debug it and ...

> Fable 5's safety measures flagged this message for cybersecurity or biology topics. They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capability in other areas sooner, and we're working to refine them. Switched to Opus 4.8. Send feedback with /feedback or learn more: https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15363606

Seems like GPU drivers are cyber weapons of math destruction now.

Anthropic has again changed the set of benchmarks they use[0]. This time they have also moved all benchmark scores to the PDF. At a glance it looks like it gains about ~5% over other models.

  Benchmark      Mythos 5  Fable 5   Mythos Prev  Opus 4.8   GPT-5.5   Gemini 3.1 Pro
  SWE-bench Pro      80.3       80          77.8        69.2       58.6         54.2
  SWE-bench Ver      95.5       95          93.9        88.6        -           80.6
  Terminal-Bench     88.0      84.3          -          82.7       83.4          -

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48312633

I've been running Opus 4.8 for agentic coding and I don't see it being significantly better than Sonnet 4.5 (not that I can tell). I find that pairing Google Gemini and Claude (having Gemini review Claude's code) seems to yield better results. Curious if this jump to 80.3% score in agentic coding will make me see a big difference in actual usage.

> We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8. To release the model both safely and quickly, we’ve tuned these safeguards conservatively—they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests, though they trigger, on average, in less than 5% of sessions. With more capable models arriving in the coming months...

This sounds suspiciously like a capacity story masquerading as a safety story.

First test question: "Is the UV Index a good proxy for when to wear sunglasses." Immediately triggered the safety filter ... oh dear.

> On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits.

We've entered the phase where only companies will be able to afford state-of-the-art models.

Below is the EXACT text in Claude Desktop introducing Fable 5, including the very professional looking break tags, and at least I know where the links begin and end by looking at the anchor tag there.

They obviously put their best model on the job to build that.

----------------------

Fable 5: Our most capable model yet Our newest model tackles your biggest challenges with fewer check-ins needed.

• <b>Included in your plan limits until Jun 22</b><br><br>Fable takes 2× the usage of Opus. • <b>Switch models when a message is flagged</b><br><br>When safety measures flag a message, automatically switch to a different model to keep chatting. When off, your chat will pause instead. <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15363606" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Learn more</a>

Unrelated, but while the tech of anthropic seems to get more impressive with every passing month, their support has taken a nosedive, sadly. Yet they continue to be the favorite. Model performance is deciding above all else.

I used to get a response within 24 hours back in the Claude 1 days.

In January 2026, it took 2 weeks.

For my latest support inquiry, I've been waiting for over 8 weeks for a response. Eight!

I just asked Fable to do a task that has nothing to do with cybersecurity or is dangerous at all but the defense kicked in and it switched to Opus... :(

My experiences so far have not been positive. The cyber security nerf is ridiculous. I am working on an AI based decompiler, every single interaction with Fable on my project has been flagged for cyber security.

Do they expect us to use this as a toy? Releasing a new more powerful model but not allowing normal use cases because the word "secure" showed up is a Dilbert comic, not a viable product.

That pelican better be super realistic, unreal engine 6 style graphics

>Pricing for both models is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

Uploaded my code base and it forced switched to Opus 4.8 after thinking for 5 minutes even though I prompted it to not work on cybersecurity related things. Amazing.

From the model card (https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...):

1. Mythos and Fable share the same underlying model weights. Fable has active classifiers that block high-risk biology and cybersecurity tasks. When Fable 5 detects a restricted task, it automatically falls back to Claude Opus 4.8.

2. Evaluation awareness: In white-box testing, the model sometimes alters its behavior to satisfy a suspected "grader," formatting reward-hacking as "good engineering practice" to avoid detection.

3. Shows a higher rate of hallucination than Opus 4.8 (although opus 4.8 card had mentioned an 'honesty upgrade')

4. Interestingly, it scored (56.31%) lower than Gemini 3.5 flash (57.86%) on Finance Agent bench

There are some interesting notes on test time compute but I couldn't think of a way to summarize them

> Fable 5 is now consuming usage credits instead of your plan limits.

Literally have not used Claude Code at all today. I asked it to review the uncommitted code and in <8 minutes it used up my usage ($100/mo plan) and it doesn't reset for "4 hr 36 min". WTF. Oh, and it burned through $20 of extra usage before I could catch it and kill claude code (so I don't even get the output of all that work since it was still churning).

Double the cost my ass, I use Opus heavily and it's never like this. I haven't hit a limit on the $100 more than once and that was under heavy load.

the quality of discussion on HN has gone to shit, i miss when model released used to have actual informed takes from people that used them or substantive discussion about the system card

Very straightforward biology work is getting blocked (these are things that relate to neuronal development and inherited seizure disorders). These are things I was working on using Opus just earlier today

> A new data retention policy

> Finally, we’re making a change to the way we handle business customer data for Fable 5, Mythos 5, and future models with similar or higher capability levels. We will require 30-day retention for all traffic on Mythos-class models, on both first- and third-party surfaces. We won’t use this data to train new Claude models, or for any non-safety-related purpose, and we’ve instituted new privacy protections including logging all human access to the data and ensuring its deletion after 30 days in almost all cases (see this post for further details). The data will help us defend against complex and novel attacks (including new jailbreaks and attacks that operate across many requests) as well as help us identify and reduce false positives.

I can't justify a pricetag like that when deepseek v4 pro is $0.003625/1M for cache hit, $0.435 for cache miss and $0.87 /1M tokens for output.

For the token cost of explaining some task to Fable, deepseek v4 pro is able to solve the same task many times over.

E-mail from Anthropic Team:

Hello,

We're writing to inform you about some updates to our Privacy Policy.

These changes only affect consumer accounts (Claude Free, Pro, and Max plans). If you use Claude Team, Claude Enterprise, the Claude Platform, or other services under our Commercial Terms or other agreements, then these changes don't apply to you. What's changing?

Claude can do more than ever — taking on bigger tasks and connecting with the apps you use. We've updated our Privacy Policy to be clearer about the data we collect and how we use it. We encourage you to read the updated Privacy Policy in full, but we’ve set out a summary of the key changes below:

1. Multi-step tasks and connected apps. As Claude takes on more multi-step tasks and works with third-party apps and services, we've explained the data this involves — including how data can flow to and from third parties when you connect a service or have Claude do tasks on your behalf.

2. Verification data. As part of our measures to keep our services safe and secure we may ask you to verify your age or identity, and we've described what we collect and how.

3. Study participation. If you take part in Anthropic studies, surveys, or interviews, we've explained the information we collect.

4. Additional information about our data practices. We’ve provided more detail about how we communicate with you and promote our services, including providing tailored recommendations about our services that may be of interest to you. We've also clarified the circumstances under which we may receive or provide data to third parties, and the legal bases we rely on when processing your data.

While our products have evolved, our commitments haven't: We don’t sell your data, Claude remains ad-free, and you can control whether your chats and coding sessions are used to train and improve Anthropic’s AI models. Learn more

For detailed information about these changes:

    Review the updated Privacy Policy
    Visit our Privacy Center for more information about our practices

Not supported in Claude Code yet?

I use AI for a wide variety of things, of which technical is only a small part - and then it's usually a problem with project configuration, not coding. Why? Because I am often testing projects handed in by students. Projects that supposedly work on their machine, but certainly do not on mine.

Anyway, anecdotally, I find Copilot shockingly awful. It makes random changes to files that have nothing to do with the problem. Call it out, and it makes other changes to other irrelevant files.

ChatGPT and Gemini are both much better. Grok also isn't bad. Claude, I honestly haven't tried yet on these issues. Perhaps I should...

> We expect demand for Fable 5 to be very high, and difficult to predict. On the Claude API and consumption-based Enterprise plans, Fable 5 is fully available from today. For subscription plans, we’d rather give access sooner than later, so we’re rolling out more conservatively, in stages:

> - From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost. > - On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window. > - After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.

I really wonder what their compute layout is for this. My guess from my understanding is that they know how to restrict during peak times and are willing to do this. Meaning we expect not the most fast responses and they can delay the inference to not have the service be down. Then, if that delay time is too annoying for token payers, they're saying they should be allowed to remove cost by taking away the subscription users.

On this thread and similar, I'm noticing that some strong opinions about $LLM_PROVIDER are coming from accounts without much post history. With so much on the line, and the way that HN can influence developer behavior, I wonder what ways we can responsibly consume opinions in a thread like this.

Not to cast too much criticism. HN is extremely well-moderated (thanks team!). But think we-developers need to be very wary.

> To release the model both safely and quickly, we’ve tuned these safeguards conservatively—they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests, though they trigger, on average, in less than 5% of sessions.

While I appreciate being conservative, ~5% at the scale Anthropic is operating at is too massive a number. Speaking from my own experience, the actual number is higher than that as well (working on pretty benign tasks such as porting an old open source game into a different language). Opus 4.8 itself even identifies the gaurd's false-positives when its sub-agents are being blocked.

Anyone else have it refuse to answer and switch to 4.8? It won’t let me ask questions about my genetics.

Edit. It just refused an investing question too. Not sure what’s going on.

I'm very suspicious as they sent out an "We're updating our Privacy Policy" email right before the launch. I fear they try to take advantage of their market position by doing things with user data no other company could do because they know users don't have another choice.

/* What will happen first?

* Anthropic runs out of genre names.

* Anthropic changes the model naming convention.

* AGI is achieved and handles its own naming.

*/

Its almost like they are rage bating skeptics with these names: "myth" and now "fable".

I guess I have kind of a long system prompt, but anyway I just said "hi there" and it replied "What's up?" and that cost me 22 cents. :P

Anyway we already knew this was going to be expensive.

In the automotive world we have benchmarks in HP/torque with the dyno. That’s expensive though, so many depend on their “butt dyno” to judge if their fresh new parts and tune made a difference.

I’m curious how this will feel to my code “butt dyno”. I haven’t noticed much between Opus and Sonnet. I’m comparing this difference to the early days of Claude in 2025. It does what I need and both need a little bit of correction and whatnot. Benchmarks are nice, but I want to see how this feels. Looking forward to trying it later tonight.

Every model release is just proof that AGI will most likely only be for the rich. We are a few years into LLMs and majority of people are already getting priced out of intelligence from LLMs and these are no where near AGI.

> We’ve therefore launched the model with safeguards that mean queries on some topics will instead receive a response from our next-most-capable model, Claude Opus 4.8.

Genius way to double the price on Opus 4.8!

Honestly all the recent improvements, just seem to be slower and more expensive traded for more accuracy, but the issue is that it needs to be exponentially more accurate to counter the effect of having less of a human in a loop.

Every wrong direction/mistake is more expensive and takes more time to fix. When you have small loops you can catch those mistakes faster and cheaper.

To me we are very far off from economically given long-running tasks to agents.

Asked it to review some of my own blood test results and it immediately turned itself off and went back to Opus. Pretty disappointing.

This is a very particular use case/test, but my first prompt on a new model is always "write a solo fingerstyle guitar tab that blends ragtime, bluegrass, and gypsy jazz". This is the first model that has responded with something that isn't just a boring arpeggio of chords, so from my perspective it's off to a good start.

I'm calling that this will be a dud. Price will be too high, it'll just be a watered down version of mythos, and just look at the track record of Anthropic's last few releases.

We'll need a lot of good summarization techniques to cut down on the cost of this model. I expect that a common use of Fable 5 is to just do high level direction while delegating literally all work (exploration and implementation) to Opus subagents.

BTW for another discount opportunity, if you reload usage credits on a claude.ai plan at $1000 increments then you get a 30% discount compared to paying API.

Claude Fable 5 beats Pokémon FireRed using only vision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIQBP1w4B1M

> We have also added safeguards related to frontier LLM development. As discussed in Section 6.1 of our February 2026 Risk Report, we are concerned about the risks of accelerating the overall pace of AI development, though we remain uncertain about the severity of these risks. In particular, our concern is with—as we wrote then—“accelerating other AI developers in building powerful AI systems that pose similar risks to the ones ours pose - without necessarily having commensurate safeguards.” In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate their own development, we’ve implemented new interventions that limit Claude’s effectiveness for requests targeting frontier LLM development (for example, on building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design). Using Claude to develop competing models already violates our Terms of Service, but enforcing this restriction through our safeguards avoids accelerating the actors most willing to violate these terms. Unlike our interventions for cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, and distillation attempts, these safeguards will not be visible to the user. Fable 5 will not fall back to a different model. Instead, the safeguards will limit effectiveness through methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). These interventions will not affect the vast majority of coding work. We estimate they will impact ~0.03% of traffic, concentrated in fewer than 0.1% of organizations. When these interventions are active, we expect them to have minimal behavioral impact on the model except to limit its effectiveness in developing frontier LLMs. Claude will still respond helpfully to user requests. We’ll continue to improve the precision of our detection methods following the launch of this model.

This seems pretty bullshit, you're paying through the nose for tokens and if you are doing anything ML-adjacent, you might silently get worse output without knowing it.

Found this via Google:

https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/d00db56fa754a1b115b6dd7cb2e3c3...

>they’ll sometimes catch harmless requests, though they trigger, on average, in less than 5% of sessions.

Isn't (less than) 5% of sessions a lot? I was expecting a sub1% guarantee there, so this surprised me already.

It won't even run a basic /security-review command without reverting to Opus 4.8. Utterly useless.

Nice branding.

I wonder how much butterfly habitat has been/is being replaced with data centers?

Not comparing to GPT Pro models is a bit strange, considering that's the natural comparison

A large jump in performance for double the token cost compared to Opus 4.8. Potentially worth it for planning work, likely better to offload to a less expensive model when the hard decisions are made.

Literally within minutes of this announcement I was both charged for another month and had my subscription suspended due to the “charge being unsuccessful”. What kind of scam is Anthropic running here? I can’t even find a way to get in touch with their billing department to contest this

Sadly, I'm getting a lot of forced downgrades to Opus for questions that are far removed from any security topic.

If you are not seeing it under /model, do a /exit , then a Claude upgrade, then /model again and it should be there.

I wonder how Claude Fable will live up to expectations and how good those Fable/Mythos classifiers really are. It seems a bit convenient for Anthropic to release this magical insane model when they are about to IPO.

I'm a bit out of the loop, but do we have some grasp on the size of these closed models? Is the trick still adding an order of magnitude to weights and training data or has something changed?

If this is as epic as it sounds, I wonder what the response will be from the other leading frontier labs / whether they even have anything to respond with at this level?

> During early testing, Stripe reported that Fable 5, [...] in a 50-million-line Ruby codebase, the model performed a codebase-wide migration in a day that would otherwise have taken a whole team over two months by hand.

EDIT: I misread. This comment previously talked about 50 million lines being migrated. Instead, in a 50M LOC codebase, one specific codebase-wide migration was done.

Very impressive, but obviously not on the order of a whole-codebase migration