http://archive.today/ZLojz

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable.

They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:

"You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks" "Wait, now it's up to half your usage" "Ok, now its..."

Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second.

That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.

Mythos? That's only for super special corporations, you need not apply. Fable? Can't even look at it wrong without running into cybersecurity lockouts. And even if you get past this, it's limited to <50% usage. It took me a month to complete a Fable review on my project.

So stingy. Even with OpenAI's recent usage troubles, they're still so much better than Anthropic it's not even funny. Re-ran the code review with Sol as a benchmark and it turns out Sol's performance is within 70%-90% of Fable's. Anthropic's still got the best model, but what does it matter if I can barely use it?

They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.

But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.

So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.

Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.

Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.

Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly?

Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or going a little nuts :)

For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for.

What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents.

Less formal document production in other industries is likely to have less structure. That might not matter in some settings but I'm having trouble thinking of an example off the top of my head.

My company still hasn’t been able to deploy wide access to Fable because it’s not available on a ZDR basis. This wasn’t mentioned in the article but I imagine this factor is not irrelevant.

Transformer models are quickly becoming a commodity, and I suspect in time we'll all be running them locally. Even now, you can run something pretty useful on a 16 GB graphics card, and I suspect a decade into the future, entry level hardware will be running better models than high-end graphics cards can run now, as entry-level hardware gets better and models get more efficient.

It doesn't mean hosted frontier models wont exist, they'll just be rare. It's no different than any other commodity market, for example most cars are cheap commodity models, with rare individuals buying expensive luxury cars and businesses buying expensive trucks and specialized equipment.

The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving.

I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder.

Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again.

Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353

The actual issue, is suspect, is that Anthropic won’t provide ZDR for Fable. Makes it a non started for a large percentage of businesses.

The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story.

Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5).

Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.

I’m not sure if the underlying data is counting subscription use for Fable, which is where a lot of people are using it because token pricing is very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was counting enterprise token usage only. As rich as enterprise customers are, they’re not exactly willing to double the cost of SWE salaries on tokens.

Either way, a model used to solve the top 10% of problems that people use AI to solve for, being used 10% of the time … seems like it’s in a decent place.

I find Fable indispensable, and measurably better than alternative models, for complex feature development in an existing codebase. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to nearly one-shotting features. Even still, I only use it for the hardest features and Opus 5 does a good enough job on the rest.

Poor analysis.

Fable is not used because it has extra retention requirement that corps can't sign off so it stays disabled for everybody in many cases.

It's also not winning on day to day work against Opus 5, which is simply available as there are no extra retention requirements and no extra paper work to do with legal.

Devs also don't like that Fable refuses to work on half of their prompts.

Then comes better pricing and on-par capabilities from competition.

Fable is just way too expensive and limited compared to GPT 5.6 Sol, and the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research. I use GPT/Codex primarily for coding and usually keep Claude on Sonnet 5 most of the time as I use Claude primarily to debug/brainstorm/make frontends as a supplement to GPT.

Like 90% of consumer AI use is stuff like "please write a summary of this PDF for me", or "Find a cheaper version of this product online", eventually the returns on model intelligence taper off for these kinds of tasks. However for the kind of frontier tasks they are testing the models on now, like math, science, etc. the marginal returns on increased intelligence are huge.

Do neoclouds win out in this scenario?

In my opinion, the big issue with Fable is that Claude Code cannot use it properly. I know, that sounds weird, but I've had Fable run down the wrong lane (and never stop) or give up and claim that something was impossible so many times (until I pointed at a GitHub repo that solves the "impossible" issue).

But a while ago, I had access to a Fable harness that just never gives up. And that verifies itself. It burned $100 in API tokens in 15 minutes ... but it succeeded for all the prompts where Fable + Claude had failed.

And I believe that's a real issue for Anthropic. Fable+Claude is not too expensive thanks to the subscription, but Claude severely nerfs Fable. To save money, I guess. Fable API + Custom Harness is a different class, it's so much better. But API tokens are so expensive, you're cheaper off hiring a freelancer.

I have 200MAX subscription for Anthropic and a RTX 5070TI 16gb GPU. I only use Claude.AI web chat and I only use Opus4.7. I build my prompts on prem with Qwen3.8:latest and copy paste them in claude.ai. I never type anything into claude.ai I am merely a copy pasting monkey. If I need to adjust something I do it from the the on prem prompt. I download code bundles from Claude.AI and push them to my git repo I host. I instruct claude to not do any testing and only let me do testing on my machine so i am not wasting claude resources. The point is to minimize the claude agents from doing anything but specifically doing coding. I can do this for 12 hours a day and reach about 80% of my weekly usage. Once I get to 3 hours left on my weekly I start a fresh chat session with Fable5 and have it do blind code reviews on everything. I only do this because I want to max out my weekly allotment and fable will get me to 20% in 3 hours on a 200MAX sub. Sometimes Fable5 does something interesting but for the most part my on prem static and dynamic code analysis have kept everything buttoned up.

Well, as a biologist, Fable is still completely unusable

Anthropic's issues, as I see them, are:

1. They acted as if they were so far ahead capability wise that they could stop listening to their users.

That is basically it. It is an extremely common belief that Opus 5 acts like a condescending wannabe-thought-leader, yet Anthropic's response to this is largely been "You're using it wrong. Try deleting all your config files".

They released a "concise" output format, but pretty much swept it under the rug, despite it being one of the loudest complaints about their models. It also, generally, does not work as described.

Not only did Opus 5 get much more difficult to work with, but it got, from a customer view, significantly slower. The token rate might be the same, but if every interaction takes 50% more tokens, it's 50% slower.

All this time OpenAI has released a slew of new models, lowered the price on them (which, bluntly, 80% of user count don't actually care about since they're on subscriptions), increased subscription capacity, and increased response speed.

It's not about cost. It's about Anthropic being the frontier-lab version of the marathon runner who decides to celebrate to early, and then loses the race.

Anthropic’s issue is churn because of the peak verbosity vomit coming out of Opus 5/Mythos/Fable. What the hell did they train it on. The sane model is still Opus 4.6.

Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work.

I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a …

I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.

I am getting close to dumping Anthropic. I like their models in general, but boy I have hit their "F you, I ain't gonna help" too many times now on innocent things. Ain't nobody wanna deal with that. I have never gotten that from Antigravity and if I did I woupd tey Codex then go to Openrouter and leave US models behind.

I mean, who says "screw you" to requests to get 35+ year old vintage computers working? Claude, that is who. Its guard rails are so stupid. I hear people trying to do simple mailing list management hit it too.

I am just about done with them.

With open models delivering close to frontier level capability, I really don't see how these labs can only focus on having best model to sustain their business. Although these model's usage will grow, I think and hope that the serving will be distributed among many players.

GLM series has made it very practical to self host. If the new update for Deepseek flash holds up, I think it would be silly for some companies to not self host.

Karma backed over their dogma.

I switched from Opus 4.7/4.8 to test Kimi K3 a few weeks back and the test hasn't finished; it's my daily driver now.

Given their general behavior and preference toward social engineering to scare the shit out of normal people...this seems fitting.

Are we at the stage yet where a super-strong model that needs oodles of safety protections to stop it outright hacking you is strictly worse for day-to-day tasks than a much cheaper model that's simply not competent enough to be dangerous?

Opus 5 is by far the best model for everything that matters to me. But it’s just too expensive. Terra 5.6 is bearable for everyday tasks, so now it’s my default.

I have a $20/mo subscription and have found myself getting limited every few minutes of late. I'm just building a simple website, but after about 15-20 mins of back-and-forth, it tells me I'm tapped out for another 5 hours.

This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't make mistakes periodically, especially when it's about to tap out. I get the sense that if I upgraded to the $200 subscription it would get me a lot more usage, but it would still run into these issues anytime I sat down to work for a few hours.

I'm just using medium effort, so it's not like I'm on high all the time.

As a small background, I have a local server and I've been trying out different models with different inference engines, quants, configurations etc... I'm also using Opus and Sol at work consistently. I've used AI since the first wave, first as a toy, then as a highly specific tool, last 6+ months as the primary LoC generator.

This is the first time I've felt, and I use the word *felt* since I don't have a suite of benchmarks or any sort of material approach towards comparing models, that Opus has declined in quality compared to before. Primarily I think its powers of deduction and understanding, even on xhigh, have become much worse. Before, being vague and providing a simple prompt would be enough, it could deduce and expand the details it needed, plus ask you clarifying questions, now this is no longer the case. A concrete, personal example, for a personal project, I've asked it to setup ssl over local IP. I didn't go into too much detail in the prompt as there are many approaches it could take and I didn't care too much to choose. It did horrible. The first thing it did was say the best lightweight approach is to add a reverse proxy. I'm like ok, makes sense. Then after asking it to proceed, it went and added a bunch of config to my golang service and didn't even setup a reverse proxy even when it said that is the way to go. It even said it didn't set it up lol. Then after I told it to do so it failed building the config in a way it was asked of it (support LAN IP and tailscale IP). Etc etc...

When Fable came out it was huge, the benchmarks told the story, and the story mostly matched the experience. It felt, again, intentionally saying felt, like it was miles ahead. Now benchmarks say that there are many models that are close, but in actual use Fable still *feels* much better. I think benchmaxxing the new open weights models is ruining the value of benchmarks, if they ever had any. When you actually put them to the test you see 500k tokens of reasoning with "Actually..." and "Wait..." in every third paragraph of their reasoning trace.

The price for Fable is definitely too much for any personal use now that it's no longer included in the subscription, and GLM 5.2, Deepseek Flash and Qwen 3.8 served locally or via cloud provide a lot, requiring a bit more babysitting though. Considering the price of Fable, my 5k USD Epyc server would pay itself off in less than a year if I used Fable or Opus in the same manner so at least for me the decision seems easy. And considering the point I'm poorly trying to make, that Opus doesn't feel like frontier anymore, this is probably the last month of my Claude subscription.

Qwen3.8 is all you need.

Hasn't it always been the premise that intelligence would get cheaper? To me, on the enterprise side, it seems like firms are finally getting the memo that, whether you are locked into the Ant/OAI ecosystem or not, you don't need the smartest, most expensive model to do every single task. This is a good thing for overall adoption. Whether that trickles down into regular user behavior, especially with subscription pricing, remains to be seen; even though I intellectually know I don't need Sol for a simple refactor, I am sometimes hesitant to choose Luna/Terra, as it's hard to accept using something positioned, even implicitly, as 'worse'. Remembering that the smaller models tend to be faster is what usually pushes me over the edge.

Anthropic in particular is much more compute-constrained than OpenAI and SpaceXAI and has relied on partnerships to provide inference. This reality factors into their pricing and usage limits (they started 'adjusting' the 5-hour limits during peak hours, and it certainly wasn't an upward adjustment). Accordingly, this is presumably what Anthropic wants, given they develop and release the lower-end models, suggest users use them in various nudges within their product, position the bigger/more expensive models as "For the most complex tasks" in their UIs, and so on.

Perhaps nerfing the cap out of your best model for press attention and hosting valuable features like thought traces isn’t such a great business model?

The foundation model companies can’t survive a token price war. If that’s where we’re heading get out your popcorn.

People understand the law of diminishing marginal returns.

I guess soon they will see the full picture

Every software engineer in my company uses Claude code heavily. However we’ve never enabled Fable and only use Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.

Nobody has complained and seems like for every use case we have Opus is more than powerful enough, especially with Opus 5

Honestly, this makes a lot of sense to me. Devs that are good at their job don't need the absolute best model for every task, and if a cheaper model gets the job done 95% as well, it's a pretty easy choice

I see variations of this post all over X. Fable doesn't get much usage, since Opus 5 is like 99% as good at a lower price point. And perhaps more importantly also faster.

People here won't believe this, but Anthropic will begin to decline after their IPO when everyone runs to good enough cheaper models to save on token spend.

im using fable almost exclusively, i just buy a new 200$ license if i run out of capacity. its so much better, easily worth it given how much work I get done. I built a code, deploy, e2e test loop with my full aws infra, fable just implements linear tasks constantly, 5 at a time, tests the whole thing end to end

if people dont see why they need a model this smart, they probably arent using ai enough

Which is why they are rushing to an IPO.

Yeah I mean if I run out of tokens every couple of hours and have to pause my work or shell out more money I’ll switch to other tools that don’t have this problem. Though they turned this down a bit it seems, I can work with Fable reasonably now and I enjoy it actually. I think they were just testing out how much they can raise the cost without users leaving when having the best model. I guess not much after all!

Anthropic's privacy deviation (ZDR) for Fable is why my organization forbids usage of Fable.

The market correcting itself.

Not just that but also Opus 5 is real trash. It's free for me (company pays) and I still prefer to use other models.

"Almost Nobody Is Using Anthropic’s Fable 5" - https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/almost-nobody-is-u...

this article reads like a leak from a bank that didn't court the IPO.

Anthropic is the fastest-growing software company in history. They have no issues "attracting users"

"If not [bubble]... why bubble shaped?" lol =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiYaWFP59Q

I've been saying since the beginning. Models. are. WORTHLESS. If your company depends on having the best model, you have lost.

Reads like: brilliant Carnegie Mellon University computer science grad struggles to find job where he is not replaced by cheap, inferior Indian labor that still gets the job done, even if it takes marginally longer.

No shit we're all paying 清冲 Flash to do the grunt work. Turns out though, paying 清冲 Flash a few more cents does exactly what Ivy Wasp Pro Mythical does. Crazy how that works.

I've always wondered why everyone flocks to SV's latest darling company. Have we not learned from our history of glorifying these SV darlings that turn hostile?

Absolutely zero people, rounding up generously, are replacing Fable with local or Chinese models.