Fable 5 is Back

I think this is as good as time as any to bring up that fable/mythos weights are one mistake (malicious or not) away from being leaked to adverseries or available in a random torrent.

Imagine this, fable weights are likely distributed to hundreds of datacenters with likely thousands of people directly or indirectly having partial or full access. I just don't quite buy that a 'world ending' fable/mythos model would be treated like this, mythos I could maybe believe that it runs inside government compliant datacenters which have a proven track record, but something as valuable as a 'world ending' model invites state sponsored actors to put in significantly more effort into exfiltrating it.

Whatever the real story is I doubt this is as ground-breaking as anthropic claims it to be.

With this Fable release my goodwill for Anthropic went down.

"Generous and exciting" were my thoughts when I bought the $100, then upgraded to the $200 sub last year. Now I get big FOMO because I won't be able to pay for Fable once off the sub, and I got the global limit reset at the same time as my weekly reset (Codex coupon for limit reset feels way better btw). The all-you-can-eat buffet put the nice items into a separate menu and it won't feel like the spot to take your family anymore.

Anthropic can find ways to integrate Fable into subscriptions so you'd still be part of the same tribe, even if you only get a sip of it for a while. A complete shut off tells you: sorry, the policy is changing and this place will be about showing off your access to the best.

That's weird but what would have been a Fable-ulous (sorry) addition to the offer just made other subscriptions from OpenAI/ZAi/... more appealing, because they don't segregate people.

I gave it a book on human consciousness I was writing and it flagged it. This model is hilariously bad. Anthropic has defanged this model to the point of malice. No way am I paying to use something that is basically useless.

It is surprisingly half baked for something the company seems to be proudly charging my first born child and both of my kidneys for.

Especially considering its all for the privilege of getting half way through a standard dev task before it just bricks out of nowhere on the 'safety' guardrails because of a keyword that often appears to be created by the model itself?

I've been running Fable on a few different projects and just by itself on same codebase it'll brick, so looks like it can just straight up create its own demise.

I do not think any of us yet have to worry about being 'replaced with ai' if the 'premiere ai company' still can't put out their flagship product with minimal qa. This is embarassing.

And the short 7 day window for subscribers is just taking the piss. So happy I'm paying hundreds per month to be free qa for anthropic, god knows they need the help.

The loss of trust in using US based model's is unlikely to come back though.

Anthropic with it's hyped doomsday messaging, and the administration falling for it (at best), has eroded a lot of trust and has triggered an arms race of sorts.

I'll be using it tonight but grudgingly so. Grudgingly because after July 7th, I'm not going to all of a sudden, start paying API prices (and maybe that's the problem) when I'm used to a subscription that gives me multiples in comparative value. Perhaps this is the fabled "token economics will come for everyone this year" that I've been reading about? In any case, I'll use the hell out of it to extract as much as I can, then back to the trusted partners Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 (for however long they remain available).

Maybe, for some projects, instead of generating code with it, it would be useful to generate a plan and the loop(tests/formal verification),because those take much less tokens than a full project, and than use the loop using the older models ?

I am only a casual Clause (Pro) user and I am confused by the messaging, maybe I'm missing something obvious.

> Until July 7, you can use up to 50% of your plan's weekly usage limit on Fable 5.

Does this mean that being able to use Fable on my subscription is a time-limited promotion? I have a subscription, why can't I just... use the model? Is it the case that going forward a subscription will only give you access to older models and newer ones will require additional payment?

> Until July 7, you can use up to 50% of your plan's weekly usage limit on Fable 5. If you hit your limit, you can continue on Fable 5 with usage credits. Fable 5 draws down usage faster than Opus 4.8.

This is what I see in my Claude Code terminal. I don't feel like that 50% rule was there before?

> When Claude Fable 5 declines a request, the Messages API returns stop_reason: "refusal" as a successful HTTP 200 response, not an error

This is precisely what comes to mind when I think “successful”.

I really hope they reconsider adding Fable access back to the subscription plans, at least the 20x plan. I know it was the original intention when the 14 day (I think) time frame was originally announced, and they were working to keep it on subscription plans. But no word if thats even a thing anymore?

Not exactly. Every time I ask something using Fable, it switches to Opus. The subjects (and I tried many) seem to be irrelevant.

Basically, I can't use Fable.

I applaud the engineers that work at Anthropic, who have created both amazing products and uniquely intelligent models -- but I really shake my head at some of their business decisions and public comms which have done a lot to damage their trustworthiness in the business and developer community.

In just the past month: they decided to silently downgrade (instead of simply refusing) responses related to machine learning and other 'competitive' topics [1]. Then, they were caught fingerprinting certain request environments in a hidden way [2]. And now, once Fable is re-released after much frustration among its customers, they are providing it for a shorter period than promised (mostly over a major holiday period), with more stringent safety classifiers and a 50% haircut to usage limits.

It's hard to not view the organization as bizarrely adversarial to its customers. I was incredibly supportive of Anthropic during the supply chain debacle, as I viewed it as the capricious actions of a corrupt admin. But now I am wondering if it was just a response to the ineptness of their business leaders.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467896 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48734373

Related ongoing thread:

Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48751978 - July 2026 (63 comments)

Recent and related:

Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740771 - June 2026 (625 comments)

It won't even review a cyber security blog post I wrote. Absolutely worthless and pitiful guardrails.

I cancelled Claude. The harness is kinda broken, GPT 5.5 is good, and GLM 5.2/Deepseek is good too (with pi, especially). Just not worth the trouble. And I'm not going to pay two subscriptions.

If this model is not willing to fix security issues in your application, does it mean that it's implicitly embedding vulnerabilities as well? How can it be trusted to write secure code?

I deleted my claude account the day the samples started preaching from the pope’s address and claiming 50% of the jobs will be gone while shamelessly stealing entire corpus of human data without attribution while preaching what you can and cannot do and maliciously degrading model quality.

I hope they either never make it to IPO or crash violently.

I keep getting this error mid agent loop: "Error: claude-fable-5 is temporarily unavailable"

Planning went well, started working on the code, reading the code - all went fine

But when it started writing the code or executing the bash, sarted tetting lots of these errors

It's time for gpt 5.6 to come out too now.

It doesn't matter. The damage is done.

As a company I can not trust putting large sums of investment into using a product that may disappear the next day due to a government deciding at a whim that it should not longer be available. No contract can protect me from this and I doubt I would find an insurance that would cover this risk.

This forces me the build fallback solutions and diversify most likely resulting in not using the tech from the "high risk" provider.

Building a product on top of something like this is actually worse than building a product on top of Meta like Zynga did.

I cant even ask it to review my vitamin stack without it flagging it and switching to OPUS. It is insanely nerfed and limited. Its so bad that its made me realize that unless one goes open source the frontier labs will gatekeep everything. Determine who can use it and future versions for biology, cyber security, any number of realms. The winners and losers of the future are actively being chosen as we speak. I'm going to install open source models this weekend for the first time as a desperate attempt to escape the permanent underclass.

Coding is solved once again!

I was wrong, I thought they would only go for B2B already. But instead they will remove it from the subscription and price it at 50$/mtok. Compared to GLM-5.2 for 4.40$ that's quite a gap

I have to admit that when it was blocked, I canceled my max plan and asked for a refund. It felt like someone took away my previous toy. So I'm happy it's back again; I upgraded to max again. Coding aside, but Claude Design is phenomenal - for both new designs and redesigning existing UIs. So my customers will face a new wave of refreshed screens all over the place in coming days ;)

We really need glm to be on pair with claude. A good Chinese model against a good US model would be the ultimate competition. No bullshit scaled down models with insane restrictions. Everything open and maximum speed in model improvements. If China also would manage to master high tier chips then we truly can expect 768gb machines in 4 years from now.

In the days without Fable, I find that Opus is good enough. Now it's back, but I totally don't miss it now.

I never strongly considered open weight models before getting throttled all the time from Claude. I bought a 1 year pro subscription but my bet is I won’t renew it.

The Claude “usage” UX is very bad. At the most basic level, there is no way to know what you’re actually paying for if you buy a “pro” plan or a “max” plan. Dario will take your $200 but he will give you a secret number of tokens in return.

I have no way of knowing what the numerator or denominator are for the usage progress bars. Plus they change them all the time. There’s no way to audit it. So if there was a malicious script siphoning usage it would be really hard to detect.

Not super impressed, but I doubt my requests are getting routed to Opus -- it just doesn't seem to be as good at mathematics as it is at code (I found this to be the case last time it was released as well).

I believe they will keep fable available, but either reduce the usage to 25% or even 10% otherwise I don't think they would have put that much effort into flushing out a system like that.

Fable 5 is functionally useless not just a regression of the original Fable. totally useless not to mention when it flags your code you may have noticed in the original release the models internal reasoning was not viewable it is intros release and mines. internal thought process said I am Claude Sonnet 3.5 when I asked it what model it was while it answered I am Fable % in the chat window. And to be fair it was about as useful as sonnet 3.5

Happy to see that Fable is back, was sad to see it go after getting to use it for only 1.5 days before. Add on top sonnet 5 availability and coding is looking fine again.

I can use it but I'm not. I used it before the ban, it's better but the speed at which tokens are burned is not justified. And this makes me happy because it means I am ok with current capabilities that will soon be matched by open-source models. Open-source harness, open models, and soon self-hosted and private with models burned directly onto chips (like Talaas is doing).

So a model named 'Fable 5' is "back". Both excited, as the previous Fable 5 I had access to for just 3 days was fantastic, and anxious as (yes, in my 1 person anecdote) the model refered to as 'Opus 4.8' was stealth nerfed over the last 2 weeks to a degree I had not experienced since the massive nerfs back in the GPT-3.x days. Fingers crossed.

I asked it to do code review of some personal projects, that will only run on my system, and it keeps giving me:

This model's safeguards flagged this message. This sometimes happens with safe, normal conversations. Switched to Opus 4.8. Send feedback with /feedback or learn more

Not sure if others are having more success.

I have yet to run into a project where I felt like I needed this and was worth justifying the latent worry about it disappearing or micromanaging quota usage. Heard about massive refactors or ports that were compressed into days but I'm wondering if it's really worth the inference cost.

i did use Fable for a brief moment the last time around, and apart from being extremely expensive, it wasn't any order of magnitude better than Opus or even GPT-5.5 for my workloads (development, prototyping, some api testing). I probably could manage indefinitely on Sonnet class models

I have been testing it on my security / firewall appliance (nfSensei) and it's much improved. It's actually proceeding through a complex plan Opus 4.8 proposed.

But then again I have not tested it without a prior model planning as of yet.

Note: fable would fail immediately on any security related topic prior.

Did they remove that policy that forces retention of data for fable, even if you use it on AWS or elsewhere