Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sriramgopalan 31 days ago
How can it be legal to charge a higher fee for the Fable model, if most of the usage will default to a cheaper model behind the scenes?

It is one thing if I, as the user, choose to down-level but Claude shouldn't do this on its own.
5 comments
mnmx6t 31 days ago
Judging from their site, I think it should be OK:

"You won't be charged Fable prices for rerouted requests. Learn more about how the fallback experience works."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude/fable Under "Safeguards"

link
gck1 31 days ago
This has no mention of what happens to the prompt cache, including the "learn more" link.

Knowing Anthropic, it wouldn't surprise me if it will result in a full cache miss/rewrite at fallback, with potentially up to 1M tokens in the context window.

link
LoganDark 31 days ago
https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/build-with-claude/fallba...

Fable requests that fall back to Opus do not charge the cache miss cost of Opus.

link
bel8 31 days ago
And what happens if you also get blocked by Opus?

I couldn't find if they refund the tokens for that session or the customer is SOL.

link
gck1 31 days ago
You're paying in full for the "guardrails" embedded in the system prompt, prompt injections, refusals, fallbacks and everything else that may be caused by the service provider.

This is the new normal.

link
Salgat 31 days ago
Using only Fable, if I do /usage it will show both Fable and Opus usage, so I don't think it's charging Fable prices for Opus code gen.
link
rcr-anti 31 days ago
Originally at least the switch wasn't silent and whether to halt or auto switch was a setting in Claude Code.
link
cyanydeez 31 days ago
because it's all indistinguishable from magic when it's a cloud SaaS.

Not like you can tell the difference if you dont own any of the implementation.

link
simianwords 31 days ago
They are transparent. Don’t use it if you don’t want to. These things shouldn’t be illegal.
link
karahime 31 days ago
I agree that it shouldn't be outright illegal, but I will definitely be making the personal choice not to engage with model providers which do this. There's no amount of impressive results that could make me want to secretly pay more for less.
link