[mortenjorck]

From the original announcement last month:

> 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.

From today:

> After July 7, 2026, Claude Fable 5 is no longer included in your plan’s weekly usage limits. You can keep using Claude Fable 5 through usage credits, which let you pay for usage beyond what your plan includes.

[Farmadupe]

Is it too cynical to read the first quote as "when openai catch up, we will restore fable 5 to subscription plans"?

In other words, they're saying "We know have a monopoloy and we will take all of your money until someone offers a cheaper competing product"?

And "We intend to do this as quickly as we can" read as a non-promise then as much as it does now?

---

Well, I am assuming that this is all based on the fact that Anthropic have enough compute capacity to serve fable 5 now and in the future, and they're "only" limiting it in the coming week to get richer quicker. Since compute hardware is presumably relatively un-fungible, I'm assuming Anthropic isn't offering a week of fable-5 for everyone on rented hardware that they're paying exporbitant fees for?

In other words, my cynical read is "if they can serve it under the terms of subscription plans for a week", then they could serve it under the same terms for a month?

[glimshe]

The word "monopoly" is overused. They simply have the best model at the moment but no real monopoly-style moat or ability to crush their competition through monopoly tactics. I don't support their bait-and-switch, but if you aren't happy, don't use Anthropic. Also, as soon as someone comes up with a better model, transition won't be that painful for most users.

[chermi]

Late to this post, but my impression was that later models would be more efficient per task? Wouldn't they save compute released fable 5, maybe capping the effort, if it is actually a better model?

[Farmadupe]

I'm totally feeling you here as well. Fable is definitely quicker to first output token on `claude.ai` (ie less internal reasoning tokens being generated), and given how much more expensive decode is than prefill, I'm sure that must pay for itself pretty nicely, on top of any architectural changes that they must have made since the opus 4 architecture was locked in.

[KapVoom]

What you say make total sense.

[hungryhobbit]

You should actually be even more cynical!

See the link to Reddit in my comment below for more details, but the TLDR is that (as a programmer) even when you use Mythos ... Mythos will hand the work off to Opus!

[gAI]

Eh, I have yet to get safety-switched from Fable to Opus. Your mileage may vary.

[hungryhobbit]

Whether it happens to 5% or 50% (or even 0.5%) of users, I think everyone should feel extremely cynical when a company offers a huge freebie of a product ... and fails to mention that any % of their customers will actually get yesterday's model.

[gAI]

They did talk about it at length in the post, and most of the guardrails were already there in the first release. To be clear, it shouldn't have anything to do with the user. It's the prompt, and if it switches, it'll tell ya.

[unshavedyak]

I mean for many of us this doesn’t even increase the cynicism. Ie it can’t get worse. These AI labs are already believed to be shifting behavior of these models at runtime so you never really know what you’re getting. Stability is not a thing with any provider, if you need that you have to run it locally.

I’m not offended by that because I’m already maximally offended lol.

[Avicebron]

That's such a bitter "never let a crisis go to waste" pill

[wongarsu]

To be fair, the initial deal was two weeks of access to Fable, then you have to pay (or they might be generous and extend it, as per above quote). Then for everyone outside the US the second week didn't happen. This is basically that second week.

The only slightly bitter thing is only being allowed to use 50% of the weekly limit on Fable

[freedomben]

> Then for everyone outside the US

I'm in the US, and I can promise you that it wasn't just for people outside the US that it was taken away

[anamexis]

It didn't happen for everyone inside the US, either. Also I believe it was only available for 2 days.

[kingforaday]

It's going to continue to suck getting prompt rejections on their overly aggressive "benign" safety margin thresholds [1]. Without a clear understanding of what triggers it, I guess we will pay for input/output tokens on the usage credits and not get refunds? As others on HN, I found very limited utility during the Fable 5 week in early June for my benign-engineering tasks and don't look forward to this new release, but I will try.

1. https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5

[espeed]

Fable can one-shot solutions. Opus 4.8 spins its wheels for a week or month and may never get there. Which one uses more resources?

[espeed]

I take this back. Fable is Fable in name only now. It burned through all MAX 20x tokens in two days and accomplished nothing. Relatively simple tasks.