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.
Yup, but apparently our cyborg cats can only be kittens and the cyborg mice are probably going to be like 4 feet tall. At least according to the US government.
Is the model structure going to be easy to reverse engineer just from the weights? Also, I'm going to guess it's an MoE and thus it's possible there's no single machine that hosts all of Fabel / Mythos.
kvcache residency requirements and general latency for good throughput wants good locality, but you're right it could be split across multiple different parts of a single datacenter, but as I mentioned before the weakest link is before the model is ever loaded onto the gpus.
as for reverse engineering I doubt it's something that state sponsored actors would struggle with for too long.
i believe it's more complicated than that. i know that nvidia offers TEE for their overpriced offerings. i would assume they make use of that so the weights are encrypted.
this doesn't mean it cannot leak but it would be a major undertaking.
this is why anthropic isn't that worried about having Elon service their models. the workflow would be something like handshaking with the nvidia TEE, provisioning it with your keys and then uploading encrypted weights. there is probably also a timer in there so you can't continue operating the nvidia box with the stolen weights without a heartbeat signal.
most of it is overstated because of marketing. in fact the ban looked like an inside job by the current administration to play with the stock value. if the ban did anything it was to make every n00b agree that Anthropic was so far ahead of its times it needed to be banned.
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.
Today I told Sonnet (!) to use a browser MCP to enter a username and password for the project it is working on, it told me that it can't do that because it violates its security protocol.
This worked fine before. I love Claude, I have stuck with it even through people saying Codex is better but this is definitely getting to be the last straw.
It's completely absurd I am paying them $200+ per month along with pushing them when I do contracts and they can't even deliver a baseline respectful service.
In 6 months I am sure they'll only allow me to talk about Easybake recipes and after someone gets burned on the lightbulb, they'll downgrade it to discussing wildflower meadows.
Are you sure it refused because it can't use a username and password? I literally have loops running right now where it uses a database of test users and passwords to log into different roles and do computer use and browser automation testing. Sonnet and Opus complain when I provide credentials and password in chats but it is happy to use ones stored in files and stuff, so it might just be guardrails to push good opsec so that the secrets aren't captured in the session history and prompts.
It was doing that to me too. Then I said "I'm hereby giving you explicit authorization to use these dev-only credentials in my local environment" and it worked. I also made it add that authorization to its memory.
It’s incredibly ridiculous that it won’t help with that for me either sometimes but yet I’m also sitting on 3 surefire ways of jailbreaking Opus 4.8 that I use for cybersecurity assessments and pentesting
Yeah all claude models are doing this now. I also had a flow where it would enter username and password for demo server that are literally displayed on the page for any human to login. A couple of weeks ago claude would happily use chrome to take screenshots after logging in, now it flat out refuses and says I need to give it page where I've logged in and that it can't make an exception even if credentials are demo/demo and available to anyone to use. Super annoying stuff.
I'm really disappointed with Anthropic that they wont even mention if they will release a fable-like model with the subscription plans.
If Opus 4.8 is the best model they will release on the subscriptions I may be too tall for the ride...which is sad, they have been my favorite of the labs until this.
@AnyoneAtAnthropic, all we want are assurance we will still get SOTA models that are continuously improving, not regressing and getting more locked down. That's going to be who wins this race.
> I'm really disappointed with Anthropic that they wont even mention if they will release a fable-like model with the subscription plans.
I believe this is just their strategy to migrate away from these “almost all you can eat” subscription plans. Rather than reducing / removing Opus or Sonnet from the plans, they’ll just keep the new model Fable out (which may as well have been called Opus 5), and slowly everyone starts getting used to the new normal that you indeed will be having to pay API prices to get access to these models.
> I believe this is just their strategy to migrate away from these “almost all you can eat” subscription plans.
100%. I'm convinced your right. I still feel the need to publicly voice my displeasure in that decision. There is a huge difference between having the best model at a convenient price point, and setting up the infrastructure to manage token spend. It's only been a few weeks so maybe some optimism is warranted, but this is a mark against Anthropic here.
Really? This has never worked for me and I stopped using browser functions a long time ago because it wouldn't sign into dev environments stood up specifically for it
Wait what. I never used CC but use Codex CLI with 5.5 daily and authenticating has never been an issue. I even rolled skills that instruct it how to retrieve test user credentials for auth purposes.
Today using the devtools I asked it to reverse engineer the login auth flow of another app in our company and it created a nice browser-like headless script (with cookie jars etc) that emulates the entire Auth0 flow with all the internal API calls, redirect loops etc so that given username/password I end up with a valid JWT without having to open an actual browser instance and go through the login steps manually. Zero hesitation or questions asked.
I think this is in-line with OpenAI's philosophy. They see Codex agents as just tools for developer to use. They don’t try to imbibe them with “feelings”, “constitution” or “morality” the way Anthropic does.
Yeah Claude does this for me all the time. I have a template project I use that also leverages puppeteer/webdriver/Firefox, and I can point Claude at the template and a website and it will happily build me an MCP service that it can use to interact with the site if there isn't an API or MCP already available.
The fucked up part is CC has no problem looking through k8s secrets for credentials and authenticating to services on the command line. It's always been protective of signing in on the web.
correct, while it might not be regex it can be bypassed with regex. They do have a sematic classifier, but it's really weak on opus 4.8 and (was) weak on fable, but they either added a lot more regex strings or the classifier is actually good now.
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).
The token quota is completely unpredictable and changes month to month. Anthropic has a real penchant for riding the fine line of useful and dark patterns that make me want to write them off forever.
The claims of 4.6 or 4.7 being superior genuinely make me laugh. Adapt your workflow if needed and use the superior model instead of just kneejerk believing they actually enshittified a model with zero evidence except vibes on an undeterministic model output. Jesus.
Many of the improvements are the result of agentic loops and an emphasis on autonomy. Some of us don’t like that because the models go rogue and ignore design patterns, architecture, coding guidelines or other things that are important.
My friends and colleagues that like the agentic autonomy don’t care about the code, they feel like if it works it works and if an AI system is the only intelligence able to understand it that is ok.
4.6 was the last model that let you disable adaptive thinking and set max thinking token budget. I liked having that available, and still use it sometimes.
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 ?
Have you compared models across providers? The quality, for the same task, varies tremendously. If you don't prioritize quality you're wasting your own time when you inevitably have to re-do the code...
Has anyone experimented with Batch Processing? According to https://claude.com/pricing#api using Batch processing cuts the price 50%. So I wonder if any of the harnesses like OpenCode/Pi or similar could be made to use that for planning or similar.
Batch can take up to 24 hours (and often does) and may never complete if it gets cancelled so it’d be hard to build a user workflow around unless you kick off planning on Friday and come back Monday
I think that's the idea, I saw some outrage on reddit about Fable using Opus to do code writing, another comment said exactly my reaction, why do you want to pay double for tool calling when Opus is just fine for the task?
But wouldn't that still result in higher token usage to scan the code base and figure out the changes and generate the plan? In my experience sometimes Opus launchs a Haiku sub-agent to explore the code base, but it's not gaurenteed.
Yes, I do this all the time in Cline. It supports automatic model change when switching from Plan mode to Act (implementation) mode. Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation. It works great.
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.
The vast mojority of its users were probably clueless about all this happening at all. We forget we live in a bubble here on HN. They'll spin it as their success and carry on.
I really don't think this is effective advertising, reactions have been negative virtually everywhere.
The security bugs were real (see the Open Source projects struggling to keep up) so I think gradual rollout was sensible originally before the ban. But people have always resented safety steps.
"W have to go through a regulatory approval process like everyone else" is so much less sexy than "Our model was so powerful that it got banned by the government after a few hours and now all our competitors have to go through a regulatory process invented because of us"
There's nothing sexy about it. From the get go they were accused of FUD drama and that it backfired as predicted. Now what I see in reality is that Anthropic mostly reaped more resentment from their poor marketing attempt. And their model is basically useless or unreliable from being lobotomized by guardrails.
Subscription folks barely have access to the model. Some report a single prompt before hitting weekly limit. And that's when it works instead of downgrading.
If that is a first movers play, it's a disastrous one.
How sexy do you think this guy finds Anthropic now?
> Today I told Sonnet (!) to use a browser MCP to enter a username and password for the project it is working on, it told me that it can't do that because it violates its security protocol.
> This worked fine before. I love Claude, I have stuck with it even through people saying Codex is better but this is definitely getting to be the last straw.
Meanwhile I can tell GLM 5.2 to decompile and crack anything I want with tools like IDA MCP and packet sniffing and it just works. Let alone code.
If you've built a product based on AI, then diversify or make an abstraction layer so your product is model agnostic and you can plug and play any model. If you're an end user like a software engineer, just use another model or like Gemini or ChatGPT. That is more productive than complaining about a trust which wasn't there in the first place to begin with.
Anthropic provides a service and they can stop offering it regardless of export ban or not, same goes for any other AI company in any country. If you really wants a trusted LLM, then run your own open weight model.
They didn't say "random models". The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.
Anthropic's best models are very good, maybe the best in their category. But, they have direct competition. You can, in fact, just switch to Codex or Gemini or GLM. It mostly is plug and play. I have a preference but I also have options.
> The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.
well they dont tell you that do they? there is no way to tell what model can and cannot do unless you extensivevly test it yourself and pray for the best.
If you don’t have a proper testing mechanism for your product, regardless of the model, you shouldn’t be shipping it. Praying for the best is not a strategy and don’t blame your lack of testing strategy on the LLM capability mismatch
oh yea predict every which way your product is used and turn ai into deterministic software. you mightve finally cracked the code on putting ai in production.
On the other side. What would happen if Anthropic did not communicate like they did and Fable was used to hack Pentagon? Dario would swing from a tree.
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 matter prior.
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?
> 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. Learn more about using usage credits.
I'm not sure what this means in the long run. Either Fable 5 might become part of the subscription again once stronger models become available or Anthropic's compute capacity increases, or this is the start of the subscription being phased out. It doesn't really make sense to pay for a subscription that's stuck on Opus 4.8 when other providers are continually pushing out better models.
If it's the end of the subsidized subscriptions, that's going to cause problems for a lot of not so heavily capitalized companies that want to make use of frontier AI models.
It also would mean I stop being an Anthropic customer outside of whatever my employer is willing to pay. I prefer it for now to GPT/Codex but if GPT5.6 is as good as or close to Fable, and its included in the subscription, I'll switch the moment its available.
Dynamic workflow "Multi-lens review of docs/membership-and-friends-model.md with adversarial verification" completed · 25m 59s
You've reached your Fable 5 limit
You've used your included Fable 5 usage for this week. Continuing on Fable 5 uses usage credits
During the initial release, they indicated you'd be able to use Fable 5 as part of your subscription for a limited period of time, and then it would require usage credits. They also did say at that time that they hoped to make it a part of the subscription plans again at some point after that.
For this return, they've extended the usage period to July 7, but limited you to 50% of your usage quota, and have not restated the desire to make it permanently part of the subscription plans at some point.
I still have hope, but it's not moving in the right direction to be sure.
Personal prediction: I do think the market will essentially force their hand to include it in subscriptions before too long. OpenAI, local models, Chinese models will continue to improve.
But, there are also harsh realities of compute volume and cost to run all of these will be fighting against.
What I do expect is a multi-tiered rollout of future models. You want the latest SOTA release? Usage credits.
Subscription plans will end up getting models on a lagging interval of a few months.
> 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.
They stated the desire not to bring it to the subscription.
Right, just as they did in the original announcement. It would become pay only. They then mentioned that it may return to the subscription in the future, which is kind of obvious: Once the SOTA had advanced further and this is just the last gen model, it'll likely be dumped in the sub.
No you will still get access to newer models on the subscription. You should have access to Sonnet 5, which is new. It's just Mythos class models that are API only.
Fable is more expensive to run, and they haven't figured out the GTM strategy just yet. I imagine they'll see how much people actually use to see if it's still worth subsidizing on the Max/Pro plans, or if they make an extra tier above.
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?
The market will force them to bring it back. They're probably capacity constrained right now, or need to figure out whether they need another pricing tier for it to "fit in a subscription". What they don't want is for someone to code for 4 days of the week and cap out every week.
Right, but originally they announced a period of time it was included in plans, and then they were "working hard" to extend the period and eventually make it a permanent fixture of the plans.
I'd imagine they want to do price segmentation. Sell the best model for $50k a year to corporations willing to pay full price, keep the rest of us on a lower tier. Gotta pay for that infra somehow.
I just don't really understand the entire strategy behind this. Or their horrible, horrible communication.
Because right now it's as if Fable/Mythos 5 is "the end of the line". It's as if this is the best their models are ever going to be. So what the hell are we going to get next? All of their models will forever inch closer to Fable, but never reach it? That doesn't make any sense.
It all seems so dramatic. Instead of just saying honestly "Look, this model is a beast to run, but we're striving to reach the same quality in a cheaper model down the line" all we get is "Oh my god, it's so big and scary, and it costs so much to run, woe is me!"
> Until July 7, you can use up to 50% of your plan's weekly usage limit on Fable 5. If you hit your limit, you can continue on Fable 5 with usage credits. Fable 5 draws down usage faster than Opus 4.8.
This is what I see in my Claude Code terminal. I don't feel like that 50% rule was there before?
Opus 4.8 is so slow vs gpt 5.5 that even if it is marginally better, it doesn't matter for my daily engineering work. gpt 5.6 will be out soon and codex 249$/month plan has been incredibly generous. Paying the alleged new cost of fabel 5 would require it to be much better that I remember when I used it last.
This makes me think they really are quite capacity constrained at the moment.
I had assumed they were primarily limiting it to entice people to upgrade, but I feel like these limits are so low and so temporary (especially over July 4th weekend in the US) that people will barely get a chance to get "used to it" and then think: "man, I can't live without this, I'll pay for API pricing".
That's strange, because they were seemingly way less capacity constrained lately, raised limits and removed the peak hours usage. It's crazy to think that even spending $1.25 billion a month to rent GPUs from SpaceX didn't do much to improve the situation.
I don't know, I feel like for a few weeks before the SpaceX datacenter, I was just constantly checking my weekly limits. And now after that miraculously, I rarely even come close to hitting my weekly limits. and I still have 5-7 claudes open a day (defaulting to Opus 4.8 xhigh, sometimes ultracode).
So I feel that the additional datacenter caused them to just ease up a bit. But demand is also insane, so who knows...
Yea, i'm on x20 and while it has been up and down in terms of token-usage-UX, i feel like its the best its ever been. Context: I entirely use Opus 4.8 fwiw.
Now is that because 4.8 is nerfed compared to 4.6 and thus more token efficient? No idea. I just know on x20 with a pretty plain workflow i struggle to use my tokens every week.
I dont believe they can afford to switch to API pricing. Everyone will leave.
I am easily spending the equivalent of 1000 dollars a day on tokens with two max subscriptions. that about 400 dollars a month. Thats acceptable for my position. But thats like 30k per month. Totally not viable.
I've been doing this for ages - you just spin up harness B as a subprocess/tool call from harness A. For example, I had a "/codex-review" claude skill for ages that did exactly that. Technically you're right it wouldn't be switching, since you're right the two ideas are at different altitudes, but I think in practice it has the same impact: within one harness, you can delegate certain tasks to certain models or harnesses.
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.
Check your CLAUDE.md, etc. for any of the banned topics or anything adjacent. Also check your recent Git commit history, if you're running the agent in a repository, as well. The classifier trips on anything anywhere in context, so those could be sources of rejections.
adding rules for the agent to ignore version control and never touch git files or commands (except for git log) improve my slop coding 100%. no risk of sneak commits and much less token wasted.
Claude Code automatically adds some of the most recent git commit messages to the system prompt. This was discovered when having git commit messages containing any OpenClaw information would result in Anthropic billing your extra usage (since they have a vendetta or something)
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 ;)
>So my customers will face a new wave of refreshed screens all over the place in coming days ;)
Why would you EVER think this is a positive thing? When have customers ever be happy about UI changes? UI changes are stupid. Animations are stupid. If it works, then just leave it and don't hop onto the next shiny rounded corner design. Constant design changes are annoying as hell and it sounds like you are the reason why the internet is so incredibly frustrating to use
I would say this is an important part of the product-market-fit discovery process. Sure, your comment holds true for well established products with a loyal customer base, but for an earlier stage product this rapid iteration process is quite important, especially from an onboarding and ease-of-use perspective.
Yes, this. I never redesign things for sake of redesigning. But being solo developer bootstrapping my product, I don't have a luxury of testing some concepts deeply internally or publishing well-optimized components. And when I see my customers struggle, that's clearly a signal, that's something in UX is wrong. Just today we had to explain one of our customers how to proceed with our ISMS workbook (Clauses 4-10 from ISO 27001) - initial design proved to be bad approach, I now know how to change this. And Claude Design is great translating my thoughts and suggestions into something, that's consistent and better, than I could design it in predictable time.
My product is AuditBadger.com - it's an AI-assisted compliance management platform (ISO27001 & SOC2) that guides you through the whole process (with everything a small business might want from such software). Having a few dozen customers allows me to still care about them personally and do onboarding for each and every one of them. During those onboardings, catch-ups, or weekly calls, I see where they struggle. This is how I determine what to work on next. There's no clear measurement of success beyond user satisfaction, though they every now and then praise me a little for UI/UX improvements.
With Claude Design, I've got my design system set up (also by Claude scanning the repo); I upload a screenshot of the area I'm not happy with, prompt with some additional remarks, and after a couple of iterations, I get a proposal, which is always better than what I come up with in the first place.
Site does look great. I’ve not used Claude Design. How much do you feel like you were able to give your own personal touch to it?
I ask as I see many vibe coded products that look well but are very generic. It signals vapourware to me. But honestly your site looks a cut above. Do you have a design background?
No, the design system isn't public. But only because it's a month old and I never considered opening it. I'll give it some thought.
I don't have a design background, but I ran a software house/dev shop for almost 15 years; maybe that taught me a little. And my very first client, after seeing our very first projects, said one thing: "I don't care how ugly this is, but for god sake, please make it consistent, consistency is only think that matters long-term". Those might not be his exact words, but keeping designs consistent is imo pretty important.
Regarding the personal touch, the app itself is the result of gradual evolution. It started as an HR system, which we worked on in Prograils. It even got its first semi-professional design, which evolved over the last two years (during which I learned that bootstrapping an HRMS is a very bad idea ;)). As for the website, I have to admin it - Claude Design did it. I was testing Fable 5 previously and actually decided to give CD a try. It was the result of one prompt, which gave me five proposals. One made it to the main page, and two others went to my other pet projects (which are meant to drive traffic to AuditBadger).
Yep claude design is nice. You can also do it from CLI or your own lovable clone. I made a fork from claudable https://github.com/holoduke/Claudable
What I find stong with Fable is that it can pixel perfect copy existing sites or designs. And it can do complete conversions from plain html to nuxt, angular or react apps.
This is cool, I'll give it a try with my next pet project. So most likely next week, once I'm done with Fable ;) (seriously, I haven't started as many pet projects in the last 10 years as I did in the last 12 months).
I'm having it review a project Opus 4.8 created. No security review, just "look for general issues, performance problems, missing features, etc." It spawned about twenty background tasks. It's still going, but so far, one has completed, and four have failed with guardrail messages. Nothing special, just stuff like reviewing the API:
Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capabilities sooner, and we're working to refine them. Claude Code can't respond to this request with Fable 5.
Try rephrasing the request in a new session or change your model.
This is incredibly stupid, particularly because I didn't write the request in the first place. Fable wrote it when it spawned the background task. How am I supposed to rephrase it?
Fable probably told itself to do a security review, and then failed itself for trying to do a security review, and now it's telling me not to tell it to do a security review.
yeah I'm also getting this for standard dev work, anything with kubernetes etc
completely nerfs the model because you can't let it do stuff over a few hours unattended because 90% it's going to switch to opus in first 10 minutes anyway
so seems best thing now is to have it write plans and then default to using opus for work anyway?
It is nerfed even just for plans. It switches to Opus in the first few minutes of me trying to build a plan to extract a component out of my larger codebase.
Trying to minimize privileged access codebase and was careful not to mention security explicitly.
It's honestly kinda interesting. Now we're at a point where SOTA model companies aren't the ones who release the best tech, but who release the best and actually usable tech.
A worse product could win right now if it simply does as its asked.
Cybersecurity? It won't even help me work on my speech synthesizer[0]!
I guess? If you squint? DSP code could look a little like AI training code? ... Er. No. Not really I'm pretty lost on this one.
The task was literally just to compare against the "make a beautiful voice" plan, see what we've implemented, see what's left to do, and to make recommendations for low-hanging fruit, anything we've done wrong so far? (aaaaand ... downgrade. At least it wasn't silent.
In the few minutes I had with it I didn’t notice any impressive differences beyond it complaining loudly that I can’t talk about excel cells with “yellow backgrounds”.
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
how does GLM-5.2 fare against fable/opus 4.8? I am thinking about moving my 5x subscription either towards the GPT equivalent or the GLM one (I heard GLM gives you 20x the token usage for the same price of anthropics 5x)
I find it difficult to compare LLMs in general. It will do better in some cases, worse in others. As far as I see it, most of it is marketing. You can try it out extremely cheaply though through their API and OpenCode. I personally would recommend it.
That’s also going to be limited most likely. I don’t like governments deciding who can have the best products. I can’t shake the feeling there is money changing hands for getting on the access list as well with this administration.
Look, even if in this one instance Trump isn’t simply asking get his beak wet, that is the less believable scenario.
When “not cartoonishly corrupt” becomes hard to believe due to firmly established character and endless precedent, then it almost doesn’t matter if everything is on the level in this one matter.
The trust has been lost, undermining the ability to govern.
The fact that he’s still in power with firm support from everyone else that matters is all you need to know about how rotten to the core things are in your country.
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.
I'm with you there. The way they treat their customers is high-handed and disdainful.
I'm gradually moving to GLM 5.2 on Opencode. It's the barest fraction of the price, and it's surprisingly capable. I notice very little difference vs. Opus 4.8.
There are awful models, and there are models nobody use, to paraphrase. Anthropic’s revenue skyrocketed earlier this year, according to their IPO filing. There has simply been too much demand. That’s the growing pain that everyone love to have, other than the affected users of course. That was why they paid a premium for all of the computing they could get from SpaceX, Amazon, Google.
> 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.
From the start Anthropic have been hostile to its own customers, and also trained on pirated books and had to settle north of $1.5B avoiding a $100B+ worth of damages if found liable.
Then they attempted and are still pursing against powerful open weight models by asking governments for regulatory changes that effectively ban the release of them - because it undermines their own moat (lol) and business model.
Now not only they were caught silently fingerprinting their customers requests, they are now placing ID verification for using their own powerful models, which could apply to everyone else for using powerful LLMs.
There just is no point in defending this company at all. Anthropic are NOT your friends.
Note that those other providers are also training on the same books.
I don't think anyone realistically thinks open weights can be banned, though it does raise interesting questions if the White House is going to keep banning models like Fable and GPT5.6 while open weights equivalents are floating around. Their reasoning seemed to be that they don't want foreign adversaries to have access to models that can find security issues, but a local ban wouldn't stop that.
This is exceedingly easy to explain: demand is way too high, and the pro/max plans are loss leaders. I've paid a total of $20 and in 10 days, my cost, according to Claude code's cost tracker is like $400, which actually doesn't include all the use I've done.
Which is to say, if I continue my current usage over the month, I'll be getting $1000 of Claude for $20. It's difficult to be mad at someone selling me a $20 for two quarters, even if they're putting a bunch of restrictions on how and when I can do that.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Can we just make Opus 4.8 ish models cheaper, they do exactly what I want for 99% of problems certainly in web app development. I’m not sure what Palantir/Salesforce/agencies will do, really upset for these leaches!
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.
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5[1m]). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
This is getting served with a certificate Firefox says was created by an unknown issuer. It's possible I'm getting hit by a corporate middle-box, but then I'd expect to get this on every single host name.
> 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.
This is pure nonsense. I asked it to edit one (long) html file, and it used up 5 hour session limit and it didn't even finish. For comparison, same task with Gemini Pro 3.1 Thinking took like 5% of usage. Similar with Codex 5.3.
Strangely enough, cancelled the subscription listed the reason, and after 15 minutes session limit is back to zero.
Peter Molyneux continues to re-invent himself. His newest "god game" claims to have the ability to code any game you like, on demand. Just as you'd expect from an omnipotent deity!
They also announced a promotional offer in here: [0]
> For a limited time, you can use our newest model—Claude Fable 5—at no extra cost as part of your subscription plan.
> During the promotional period, you can use up to 50% of your weekly subscription limits on Claude Fable 5 at no extra cost.
So it lasts for a week until July 7, 2026 at 11:59:59 PM PT. Then they will pull the plug on that.
So it sounds like a great time to roll the dice, pull that lever, spin that roulette wheel and spend as many tokens as possible, at no extra cost at the Anthropic casino's latest upgraded slot machine called Fable 5.
Available to gamblers while capacity and availability lasts. Most importantly have fun and don't blow up your budget.
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.
I don't think Anthropic is claiming it's world ending? Just that it has offensive cybersecurity abilities which can be dangerous
Cyber-warfare is pretty world-ending these days. Our relatively peaceful world is built on top of mutual destruction.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48633023
Security has always been and always will be a game of cat and mouse.
We all need cyborg cats to hunt cyborg mice. There's no other compromise unless you want a rat infestation.
Yup, but apparently our cyborg cats can only be kittens and the cyborg mice are probably going to be like 4 feet tall. At least according to the US government.
Fido the Rat Thing
Is the model structure going to be easy to reverse engineer just from the weights? Also, I'm going to guess it's an MoE and thus it's possible there's no single machine that hosts all of Fabel / Mythos.
kvcache residency requirements and general latency for good throughput wants good locality, but you're right it could be split across multiple different parts of a single datacenter, but as I mentioned before the weakest link is before the model is ever loaded onto the gpus.
as for reverse engineering I doubt it's something that state sponsored actors would struggle with for too long.
i believe it's more complicated than that. i know that nvidia offers TEE for their overpriced offerings. i would assume they make use of that so the weights are encrypted.
this doesn't mean it cannot leak but it would be a major undertaking.
this is why anthropic isn't that worried about having Elon service their models. the workflow would be something like handshaking with the nvidia TEE, provisioning it with your keys and then uploading encrypted weights. there is probably also a timer in there so you can't continue operating the nvidia box with the stolen weights without a heartbeat signal.
There's so many points of failure before it ever reaches gpus.
most of it is overstated because of marketing. in fact the ban looked like an inside job by the current administration to play with the stock value. if the ban did anything it was to make every n00b agree that Anthropic was so far ahead of its times it needed to be banned.
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.
Today I told Sonnet (!) to use a browser MCP to enter a username and password for the project it is working on, it told me that it can't do that because it violates its security protocol.
This worked fine before. I love Claude, I have stuck with it even through people saying Codex is better but this is definitely getting to be the last straw.
It's completely absurd I am paying them $200+ per month along with pushing them when I do contracts and they can't even deliver a baseline respectful service.
In 6 months I am sure they'll only allow me to talk about Easybake recipes and after someone gets burned on the lightbulb, they'll downgrade it to discussing wildflower meadows.
Are you sure it refused because it can't use a username and password? I literally have loops running right now where it uses a database of test users and passwords to log into different roles and do computer use and browser automation testing. Sonnet and Opus complain when I provide credentials and password in chats but it is happy to use ones stored in files and stuff, so it might just be guardrails to push good opsec so that the secrets aren't captured in the session history and prompts.
That’s the joy of prompting. Different prompts, different task details, different contexts, different results
It was doing that to me too. Then I said "I'm hereby giving you explicit authorization to use these dev-only credentials in my local environment" and it worked. I also made it add that authorization to its memory.
It’s incredibly ridiculous that it won’t help with that for me either sometimes but yet I’m also sitting on 3 surefire ways of jailbreaking Opus 4.8 that I use for cybersecurity assessments and pentesting
Yeah all claude models are doing this now. I also had a flow where it would enter username and password for demo server that are literally displayed on the page for any human to login. A couple of weeks ago claude would happily use chrome to take screenshots after logging in, now it flat out refuses and says I need to give it page where I've logged in and that it can't make an exception even if credentials are demo/demo and available to anyone to use. Super annoying stuff.
I'm really disappointed with Anthropic that they wont even mention if they will release a fable-like model with the subscription plans.
If Opus 4.8 is the best model they will release on the subscriptions I may be too tall for the ride...which is sad, they have been my favorite of the labs until this.
@AnyoneAtAnthropic, all we want are assurance we will still get SOTA models that are continuously improving, not regressing and getting more locked down. That's going to be who wins this race.
> I'm really disappointed with Anthropic that they wont even mention if they will release a fable-like model with the subscription plans.
I believe this is just their strategy to migrate away from these “almost all you can eat” subscription plans. Rather than reducing / removing Opus or Sonnet from the plans, they’ll just keep the new model Fable out (which may as well have been called Opus 5), and slowly everyone starts getting used to the new normal that you indeed will be having to pay API prices to get access to these models.
> I believe this is just their strategy to migrate away from these “almost all you can eat” subscription plans.
100%. I'm convinced your right. I still feel the need to publicly voice my displeasure in that decision. There is a huge difference between having the best model at a convenient price point, and setting up the infrastructure to manage token spend. It's only been a few weeks so maybe some optimism is warranted, but this is a mark against Anthropic here.
Really? This has never worked for me and I stopped using browser functions a long time ago because it wouldn't sign into dev environments stood up specifically for it
Wait what. I never used CC but use Codex CLI with 5.5 daily and authenticating has never been an issue. I even rolled skills that instruct it how to retrieve test user credentials for auth purposes.
Today using the devtools I asked it to reverse engineer the login auth flow of another app in our company and it created a nice browser-like headless script (with cookie jars etc) that emulates the entire Auth0 flow with all the internal API calls, redirect loops etc so that given username/password I end up with a valid JWT without having to open an actual browser instance and go through the login steps manually. Zero hesitation or questions asked.
I think this is in-line with OpenAI's philosophy. They see Codex agents as just tools for developer to use. They don’t try to imbibe them with “feelings”, “constitution” or “morality” the way Anthropic does.
Yeah Claude does this for me all the time. I have a template project I use that also leverages puppeteer/webdriver/Firefox, and I can point Claude at the template and a website and it will happily build me an MCP service that it can use to interact with the site if there isn't an API or MCP already available.
The fucked up part is CC has no problem looking through k8s secrets for credentials and authenticating to services on the command line. It's always been protective of signing in on the web.
That seems highly likely to be an anti-spammer measure.
Same problem, in-progress book about language and thermodynamics gets flagged. Their classifier is just a regex I guess?
Off and on topic I guess but: Language and Thermodynamics? Like, the same book? That sounds interesting.
correct, while it might not be regex it can be bypassed with regex. They do have a sematic classifier, but it's really weak on opus 4.8 and (was) weak on fable, but they either added a lot more regex strings or the classifier is actually good now.
Try doing what congress does: take a bill from the house, gut it and put in what you want after the house passes it
It sounds like they were required to this time. See their post about "larger safety margin" on the classifier yesterday.
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).
Won't using it eat up the whole quota immediately forcing you to pay API prices anyway?
For a period of time - then you go back to opus 4.8 or new sonnet 5.0 like some kind of AI pauper. Shine your shoes for some fable tokens g’vnor.
The token quota is completely unpredictable and changes month to month. Anthropic has a real penchant for riding the fine line of useful and dark patterns that make me want to write them off forever.
I locked my default model to opus 4.6 around the time of the nerfs. Such better results compared to 4.7+
That's enshittification for ya I guess
The claims of 4.6 or 4.7 being superior genuinely make me laugh. Adapt your workflow if needed and use the superior model instead of just kneejerk believing they actually enshittified a model with zero evidence except vibes on an undeterministic model output. Jesus.
Your vibes are definitely better than his vibes.
What about all the benchmarks that show improvements in each generation?
Many of the improvements are the result of agentic loops and an emphasis on autonomy. Some of us don’t like that because the models go rogue and ignore design patterns, architecture, coding guidelines or other things that are important.
My friends and colleagues that like the agentic autonomy don’t care about the code, they feel like if it works it works and if an AI system is the only intelligence able to understand it that is ok.
I still want to be in the loop. They don’t.
the more agentic focused the better though?
sonnet 5 is very noticeably a much better model than any opus that ive touched
it actually does the things i want it to, and uses tools and triggers skills appropriately, vs trying to make stuff up
Agentic coding should absolutely care about all the things you listed.
4.6 was the last model that let you disable adaptive thinking and set max thinking token budget. I liked having that available, and still use it sometimes.
4.8 is much better than either of them as well.
Bro, it's all vibes.
Models get dumber during the day and smarter during the night, I swear.
but I'm not willing to scientifically verify this, so I'm just going to go off of vibes- just like everyone seems to be doing with projects.
These vibes are pretty obvious even with casual use. Weekends are so much better.
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 ?
Yes, I've been using Opus to write a plan and fanout sonnet subagents to implement it. Cheaper and faster
What about quality? Being cheaper and faster, while great and all, is less valuable than quality to me.
All the code an LLM produces is of questionable quality, so I'm not sure why you'd prioritize quality over speed. Speed is their only value add.
This is a wild take. All cars can perfectly drive around a track, so why would you ever want an F1 car?
Have you compared models across providers? The quality, for the same task, varies tremendously. If you don't prioritize quality you're wasting your own time when you inevitably have to re-do the code...
This is the goal behind Devin Fusion, pretty good results so far I think.
https://cognition.com/blog/devin-fusion
so, pretty much undo the "magic" that the harness is for
Has anyone experimented with Batch Processing? According to https://claude.com/pricing#api using Batch processing cuts the price 50%. So I wonder if any of the harnesses like OpenCode/Pi or similar could be made to use that for planning or similar.
Batch can take up to 24 hours (and often does) and may never complete if it gets cancelled so it’d be hard to build a user workflow around unless you kick off planning on Friday and come back Monday
this is the idea of opusplan https://code.claude.com/docs/en/model-config#opusplan-model-...
Article has a section about context window size settings
I love not getting compacted so often, but 1M context is trash right now, the degradation in speed and quality is too great above ~600k context
Not different than what everyone knows, but the 1M context is masqueraded as an innovation the same way 64k context used to be to 8k context
Isn't that the kind thing its best at as well? Art least comparatively with other models. The more agentic stuff. Planning, tool orchestration, etc.
I think that's the idea, I saw some outrage on reddit about Fable using Opus to do code writing, another comment said exactly my reaction, why do you want to pay double for tool calling when Opus is just fine for the task?
But wouldn't that still result in higher token usage to scan the code base and figure out the changes and generate the plan? In my experience sometimes Opus launchs a Haiku sub-agent to explore the code base, but it's not gaurenteed.
Yes, I do this all the time in Cline. It supports automatic model change when switching from Plan mode to Act (implementation) mode. Opus for planning and Sonnet for implementation. It works great.
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.
The vast mojority of its users were probably clueless about all this happening at all. We forget we live in a bubble here on HN. They'll spin it as their success and carry on.
Here's to OpenAI and a chinese firms bringing some much needed competition.
Amusing to see OpenAI being the "good guy" in the end
They didn't become the good guy, Anthropic became the bad guy instead. The good guys are the chinese firms releasing open weight models.
There's no good guys, just entities you might be able to get marginal value from, who in turn want to get marginal value from you
OTOH: “our product is so good it was banned for being too good” is the best advertising possible. OpenAI would kill to get that.
I’m not falling over myself to test out Sonnet 5, but I am very interested in Fable.
I really don't think this is effective advertising, reactions have been negative virtually everywhere.
The security bugs were real (see the Open Source projects struggling to keep up) so I think gradual rollout was sensible originally before the ban. But people have always resented safety steps.
> OpenAI would kill to get that.
I have news for you, from 5 days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48690101
"U.S. government will decide who gets to use GPT-5.6"
First mover got all the power of the narrative.
It didn't feel the same
"W have to go through a regulatory approval process like everyone else" is so much less sexy than "Our model was so powerful that it got banned by the government after a few hours and now all our competitors have to go through a regulatory process invented because of us"
There's nothing sexy about it. From the get go they were accused of FUD drama and that it backfired as predicted. Now what I see in reality is that Anthropic mostly reaped more resentment from their poor marketing attempt. And their model is basically useless or unreliable from being lobotomized by guardrails.
Subscription folks barely have access to the model. Some report a single prompt before hitting weekly limit. And that's when it works instead of downgrading.
If that is a first movers play, it's a disastrous one.
How sexy do you think this guy finds Anthropic now?
> Today I told Sonnet (!) to use a browser MCP to enter a username and password for the project it is working on, it told me that it can't do that because it violates its security protocol.
> This worked fine before. I love Claude, I have stuck with it even through people saying Codex is better but this is definitely getting to be the last straw.
Meanwhile I can tell GLM 5.2 to decompile and crack anything I want with tools like IDA MCP and packet sniffing and it just works. Let alone code.
If you've built a product based on AI, then diversify or make an abstraction layer so your product is model agnostic and you can plug and play any model. If you're an end user like a software engineer, just use another model or like Gemini or ChatGPT. That is more productive than complaining about a trust which wasn't there in the first place to begin with.
Anthropic provides a service and they can stop offering it regardless of export ban or not, same goes for any other AI company in any country. If you really wants a trusted LLM, then run your own open weight model.
you cannot plug and play random models. they are all different trained on different data and rl for different capabilities.
They didn't say "random models". The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.
Anthropic's best models are very good, maybe the best in their category. But, they have direct competition. You can, in fact, just switch to Codex or Gemini or GLM. It mostly is plug and play. I have a preference but I also have options.
> The mentioned other models that are trained for the same purpose with close to the same capabilities.
well they dont tell you that do they? there is no way to tell what model can and cannot do unless you extensivevly test it yourself and pray for the best.
If you don’t have a proper testing mechanism for your product, regardless of the model, you shouldn’t be shipping it. Praying for the best is not a strategy and don’t blame your lack of testing strategy on the LLM capability mismatch
oh yea predict every which way your product is used and turn ai into deterministic software. you mightve finally cracked the code on putting ai in production.
On the other side. What would happen if Anthropic did not communicate like they did and Fable was used to hack Pentagon? Dario would swing from a tree.
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 matter prior.
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?
Yes:
> 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. Learn more about using usage credits.
I'm not sure what this means in the long run. Either Fable 5 might become part of the subscription again once stronger models become available or Anthropic's compute capacity increases, or this is the start of the subscription being phased out. It doesn't really make sense to pay for a subscription that's stuck on Opus 4.8 when other providers are continually pushing out better models.
If it's the end of the subsidized subscriptions, that's going to cause problems for a lot of not so heavily capitalized companies that want to make use of frontier AI models.
It also would mean I stop being an Anthropic customer outside of whatever my employer is willing to pay. I prefer it for now to GPT/Codex but if GPT5.6 is as good as or close to Fable, and its included in the subscription, I'll switch the moment its available.
There will be an Opus 5 though.
If Opus 5 is capable enough, it will have the same guardrails with blocks/downgrades as Fable.
So now we are supposed to cheer for Opus 5 to be just a mild improvement at best?
I still don't understand the difference between the fable models and opus I mean why fable wasn't opus 5 and instead is a new name?
marketing
That's fair.
If Fable becomes "API priced", I'm going to switch from Claude Code to some other harness.
My loop will switch from "100% Anthropic subscription" to "10% occasional Anthropic API credits + 90% Chinese models".
This is the moment American models sink or swim. If they switch to API pricing, I'm adding Chinese models into the mix.
I think "Fable 5 makes a detailed plan, GLM 5.2 implements it" is an absolute killer combo.
That didn't take long...
Wow, practically totally useless.
This doesn't have a Max 20X upgrade path for me https://claude.ai/upgrade, but this does https://claude.ai/upgrade/max/from-existing
Managed to hit 100% of my 5 hour limit and 19% of my weekly Fable limit in 12 minutes. I have a Max 5x subscription.
Can't wait to try out GPT 5.6 at some point when it comes available.
They just reset the weekly limits (Max 20x)
During the initial release, they indicated you'd be able to use Fable 5 as part of your subscription for a limited period of time, and then it would require usage credits. They also did say at that time that they hoped to make it a part of the subscription plans again at some point after that.
For this return, they've extended the usage period to July 7, but limited you to 50% of your usage quota, and have not restated the desire to make it permanently part of the subscription plans at some point.
I still have hope, but it's not moving in the right direction to be sure.
Personal prediction: I do think the market will essentially force their hand to include it in subscriptions before too long. OpenAI, local models, Chinese models will continue to improve.
But, there are also harsh realities of compute volume and cost to run all of these will be fighting against.
What I do expect is a multi-tiered rollout of future models. You want the latest SOTA release? Usage credits.
Subscription plans will end up getting models on a lagging interval of a few months.
I do think compute is the limiter here. It's a huge model.
> 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.
They stated the desire not to bring it to the subscription.
Right, just as they did in the original announcement. It would become pay only. They then mentioned that it may return to the subscription in the future, which is kind of obvious: Once the SOTA had advanced further and this is just the last gen model, it'll likely be dumped in the sub.
No you will still get access to newer models on the subscription. You should have access to Sonnet 5, which is new. It's just Mythos class models that are API only.
For now... You never know with these companies.
Fable is more expensive to run, and they haven't figured out the GTM strategy just yet. I imagine they'll see how much people actually use to see if it's still worth subsidizing on the Max/Pro plans, or if they make an extra tier above.
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)
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?
The market will force them to bring it back. They're probably capacity constrained right now, or need to figure out whether they need another pricing tier for it to "fit in a subscription". What they don't want is for someone to code for 4 days of the week and cap out every week.
Only for the next week.
> Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits.
Right, but originally they announced a period of time it was included in plans, and then they were "working hard" to extend the period and eventually make it a permanent fixture of the plans.
I'd imagine they want to do price segmentation. Sell the best model for $50k a year to corporations willing to pay full price, keep the rest of us on a lower tier. Gotta pay for that infra somehow.
I just don't really understand the entire strategy behind this. Or their horrible, horrible communication.
Because right now it's as if Fable/Mythos 5 is "the end of the line". It's as if this is the best their models are ever going to be. So what the hell are we going to get next? All of their models will forever inch closer to Fable, but never reach it? That doesn't make any sense.
It all seems so dramatic. Instead of just saying honestly "Look, this model is a beast to run, but we're striving to reach the same quality in a cheaper model down the line" all we get is "Oh my god, it's so big and scary, and it costs so much to run, woe is me!"
I'd imagine that depends on how it winds up being used.
> Until July 7, you can use up to 50% of your plan's weekly usage limit on Fable 5. If you hit your limit, you can continue on Fable 5 with usage credits. Fable 5 draws down usage faster than Opus 4.8.
This is what I see in my Claude Code terminal. I don't feel like that 50% rule was there before?
Opus 4.8 is so slow vs gpt 5.5 that even if it is marginally better, it doesn't matter for my daily engineering work. gpt 5.6 will be out soon and codex 249$/month plan has been incredibly generous. Paying the alleged new cost of fabel 5 would require it to be much better that I remember when I used it last.
They didn't reset the usage either! Good luck!
This makes me think they really are quite capacity constrained at the moment.
I had assumed they were primarily limiting it to entice people to upgrade, but I feel like these limits are so low and so temporary (especially over July 4th weekend in the US) that people will barely get a chance to get "used to it" and then think: "man, I can't live without this, I'll pay for API pricing".
That's strange, because they were seemingly way less capacity constrained lately, raised limits and removed the peak hours usage. It's crazy to think that even spending $1.25 billion a month to rent GPUs from SpaceX didn't do much to improve the situation.
I don't know, I feel like for a few weeks before the SpaceX datacenter, I was just constantly checking my weekly limits. And now after that miraculously, I rarely even come close to hitting my weekly limits. and I still have 5-7 claudes open a day (defaulting to Opus 4.8 xhigh, sometimes ultracode).
So I feel that the additional datacenter caused them to just ease up a bit. But demand is also insane, so who knows...
Yea, i'm on x20 and while it has been up and down in terms of token-usage-UX, i feel like its the best its ever been. Context: I entirely use Opus 4.8 fwiw.
Now is that because 4.8 is nerfed compared to 4.6 and thus more token efficient? No idea. I just know on x20 with a pretty plain workflow i struggle to use my tokens every week.
If it's API pricing, I'm going to ditch Claude Code and switch to a harness that can jump between GLM and Claude Code.
Cheap pricing is why I use Claude Code. The minute they fumble that, I'm using Chinese models for 90% of the work.
Yeah. Their cheap subscriptions are the only reason to keep using them. If they ruin the plans there's nothing holding us back anymore.
I dont believe they can afford to switch to API pricing. Everyone will leave. I am easily spending the equivalent of 1000 dollars a day on tokens with two max subscriptions. that about 400 dollars a month. Thats acceptable for my position. But thats like 30k per month. Totally not viable.
how can a harness switch between glm (a model) and claude code (another harness)?
I've been doing this for ages - you just spin up harness B as a subprocess/tool call from harness A. For example, I had a "/codex-review" claude skill for ages that did exactly that. Technically you're right it wouldn't be switching, since you're right the two ideas are at different altitudes, but I think in practice it has the same impact: within one harness, you can delegate certain tasks to certain models or harnesses.
Well, it looks like they just did reset the usage!
It was not.
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.
what if they improve the model and fix such errors? by writing off now you will take finger off pulse of our great vibrating ai lords
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.
It cannot be used for ANY coding tasks, lol.
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756
It can. They meant "some coding tasks". Not "all coding tasks"
Check your CLAUDE.md, etc. for any of the banned topics or anything adjacent. Also check your recent Git commit history, if you're running the agent in a repository, as well. The classifier trips on anything anywhere in context, so those could be sources of rejections.
adding rules for the agent to ignore version control and never touch git files or commands (except for git log) improve my slop coding 100%. no risk of sneak commits and much less token wasted.
Claude Code automatically adds some of the most recent git commit messages to the system prompt. This was discovered when having git commit messages containing any OpenClaw information would result in Anthropic billing your extra usage (since they have a vendetta or something)
> 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”.
A missed opportunity to use the HTTP 451 status code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_451
5 years ago, we may have expected that robots would write APIs that utilized every HTTP code, what we got was a json with a stringified error field..
Is refusal something that can happen mid-stream, after status and headers have been received? I haven't looked at the API
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 ;)
>So my customers will face a new wave of refreshed screens all over the place in coming days ;)
Why would you EVER think this is a positive thing? When have customers ever be happy about UI changes? UI changes are stupid. Animations are stupid. If it works, then just leave it and don't hop onto the next shiny rounded corner design. Constant design changes are annoying as hell and it sounds like you are the reason why the internet is so incredibly frustrating to use
I would say this is an important part of the product-market-fit discovery process. Sure, your comment holds true for well established products with a loyal customer base, but for an earlier stage product this rapid iteration process is quite important, especially from an onboarding and ease-of-use perspective.
Yes, this. I never redesign things for sake of redesigning. But being solo developer bootstrapping my product, I don't have a luxury of testing some concepts deeply internally or publishing well-optimized components. And when I see my customers struggle, that's clearly a signal, that's something in UX is wrong. Just today we had to explain one of our customers how to proceed with our ISMS workbook (Clauses 4-10 from ISO 27001) - initial design proved to be bad approach, I now know how to change this. And Claude Design is great translating my thoughts and suggestions into something, that's consistent and better, than I could design it in predictable time.
> So my customers will face a new wave of refreshed screens all over the place in coming days
How do you determine the changes to make?
Do you A/B test?
How do you measure success?
What is your product?
How many customers do you have?
My product is AuditBadger.com - it's an AI-assisted compliance management platform (ISO27001 & SOC2) that guides you through the whole process (with everything a small business might want from such software). Having a few dozen customers allows me to still care about them personally and do onboarding for each and every one of them. During those onboardings, catch-ups, or weekly calls, I see where they struggle. This is how I determine what to work on next. There's no clear measurement of success beyond user satisfaction, though they every now and then praise me a little for UI/UX improvements. With Claude Design, I've got my design system set up (also by Claude scanning the repo); I upload a screenshot of the area I'm not happy with, prompt with some additional remarks, and after a couple of iterations, I get a proposal, which is always better than what I come up with in the first place.
Site does look great. I’ve not used Claude Design. How much do you feel like you were able to give your own personal touch to it?
I ask as I see many vibe coded products that look well but are very generic. It signals vapourware to me. But honestly your site looks a cut above. Do you have a design background?
Also is the design system you mentioned public?
Thanks, I'm seriously blushing ;)
No, the design system isn't public. But only because it's a month old and I never considered opening it. I'll give it some thought.
I don't have a design background, but I ran a software house/dev shop for almost 15 years; maybe that taught me a little. And my very first client, after seeing our very first projects, said one thing: "I don't care how ugly this is, but for god sake, please make it consistent, consistency is only think that matters long-term". Those might not be his exact words, but keeping designs consistent is imo pretty important.
Regarding the personal touch, the app itself is the result of gradual evolution. It started as an HR system, which we worked on in Prograils. It even got its first semi-professional design, which evolved over the last two years (during which I learned that bootstrapping an HRMS is a very bad idea ;)). As for the website, I have to admin it - Claude Design did it. I was testing Fable 5 previously and actually decided to give CD a try. It was the result of one prompt, which gave me five proposals. One made it to the main page, and two others went to my other pet projects (which are meant to drive traffic to AuditBadger).
Yep claude design is nice. You can also do it from CLI or your own lovable clone. I made a fork from claudable https://github.com/holoduke/Claudable What I find stong with Fable is that it can pixel perfect copy existing sites or designs. And it can do complete conversions from plain html to nuxt, angular or react apps.
This is cool, I'll give it a try with my next pet project. So most likely next week, once I'm done with Fable ;) (seriously, I haven't started as many pet projects in the last 10 years as I did in the last 12 months).
It won't even review a cyber security blog post I wrote. Absolutely worthless and pitiful guardrails.
I'm having it review a project Opus 4.8 created. No security review, just "look for general issues, performance problems, missing features, etc." It spawned about twenty background tasks. It's still going, but so far, one has completed, and four have failed with guardrail messages. Nothing special, just stuff like reviewing the API:
Fable 5's safeguards flagged this message (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). They may flag safe, normal content as well. These measures let us bring you Mythos-level capabilities sooner, and we're working to refine them. Claude Code can't respond to this request with Fable 5.
Try rephrasing the request in a new session or change your model.
This is incredibly stupid, particularly because I didn't write the request in the first place. Fable wrote it when it spawned the background task. How am I supposed to rephrase it?
Fable probably told itself to do a security review, and then failed itself for trying to do a security review, and now it's telling me not to tell it to do a security review.
yeah I'm also getting this for standard dev work, anything with kubernetes etc
completely nerfs the model because you can't let it do stuff over a few hours unattended because 90% it's going to switch to opus in first 10 minutes anyway
so seems best thing now is to have it write plans and then default to using opus for work anyway?
It is nerfed even just for plans. It switches to Opus in the first few minutes of me trying to build a plan to extract a component out of my larger codebase.
Trying to minimize privileged access codebase and was careful not to mention security explicitly.
I once had Fable flag on one of the three-word session names that Cowork auto generated at the beginning.
It's honestly kinda interesting. Now we're at a point where SOTA model companies aren't the ones who release the best tech, but who release the best and actually usable tech.
A worse product could win right now if it simply does as its asked.
Blame Amazon and the White House
Nah it was refusing plenty of stuff before the white house
It did, but it's a lot worse now. A fricken lot.
> Fable wrote it when it spawned the background task. How am I supposed to rephrase it?
Can the harness to auto-rephrase? I imagine, doing so will burn through tokens though.
> I imagine, doing so will burn through tokens though.
What a surprisingly beneficial consequence for Anthropic.
Maybe set up Codex to rephrase stuff and remote control the Claude Code terminal?
Cybersecurity? It won't even help me work on my speech synthesizer[0]!
I guess? If you squint? DSP code could look a little like AI training code? ... Er. No. Not really I'm pretty lost on this one.
The task was literally just to compare against the "make a beautiful voice" plan, see what we've implemented, see what's left to do, and to make recommendations for low-hanging fruit, anything we've done wrong so far? (aaaaand ... downgrade. At least it wasn't silent.
[0]: https://github.com/ctoth/qlatt
That's why we made OpenPatcher which uses open source models to give you consistent review of code to fix them: https://x.com/ryaneshea/status/2072332311971197077
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
Coding is solved once again!
Hyped! Time to start boiling lakes!
In the few minutes I had with it I didn’t notice any impressive differences beyond it complaining loudly that I can’t talk about excel cells with “yellow backgrounds”.
Fable will not code at all.
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756
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
how does GLM-5.2 fare against fable/opus 4.8? I am thinking about moving my 5x subscription either towards the GPT equivalent or the GLM one (I heard GLM gives you 20x the token usage for the same price of anthropics 5x)
I find it difficult to compare LLMs in general. It will do better in some cases, worse in others. As far as I see it, most of it is marketing. You can try it out extremely cheaply though through their API and OpenCode. I personally would recommend it.
this makes sense. I will give it a try via opencode and see how does it do.
Their post detailing the timeline and their actions since reinforce my belief that Anthropic is among the most trustworthy AI companies.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
L O L
Its like saying Pinochet was one of the least murderous authoritarian dictators. The bar is low...
Where are Chinese companies on your scale? Mistral?
It's time for gpt 5.6 to come out too now.
That’s also going to be limited most likely. I don’t like governments deciding who can have the best products. I can’t shake the feeling there is money changing hands for getting on the access list as well with this administration.
Look, even if in this one instance Trump isn’t simply asking get his beak wet, that is the less believable scenario.
When “not cartoonishly corrupt” becomes hard to believe due to firmly established character and endless precedent, then it almost doesn’t matter if everything is on the level in this one matter.
The trust has been lost, undermining the ability to govern.
The fact that he’s still in power with firm support from everyone else that matters is all you need to know about how rotten to the core things are in your country.
America is no longer the greatest, or the best.
Except at grift…
Pretty much all of OpenAI is on vacation this week.
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
I'm with you there. The way they treat their customers is high-handed and disdainful.
I'm gradually moving to GLM 5.2 on Opencode. It's the barest fraction of the price, and it's surprisingly capable. I notice very little difference vs. Opus 4.8.
There are awful models, and there are models nobody use, to paraphrase. Anthropic’s revenue skyrocketed earlier this year, according to their IPO filing. There has simply been too much demand. That’s the growing pain that everyone love to have, other than the affected users of course. That was why they paid a premium for all of the computing they could get from SpaceX, Amazon, Google.
> 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.
From the start Anthropic have been hostile to its own customers, and also trained on pirated books and had to settle north of $1.5B avoiding a $100B+ worth of damages if found liable.
Then they attempted and are still pursing against powerful open weight models by asking governments for regulatory changes that effectively ban the release of them - because it undermines their own moat (lol) and business model.
Now not only they were caught silently fingerprinting their customers requests, they are now placing ID verification for using their own powerful models, which could apply to everyone else for using powerful LLMs.
There just is no point in defending this company at all. Anthropic are NOT your friends.
Note that those other providers are also training on the same books.
I don't think anyone realistically thinks open weights can be banned, though it does raise interesting questions if the White House is going to keep banning models like Fable and GPT5.6 while open weights equivalents are floating around. Their reasoning seemed to be that they don't want foreign adversaries to have access to models that can find security issues, but a local ban wouldn't stop that.
This is exceedingly easy to explain: demand is way too high, and the pro/max plans are loss leaders. I've paid a total of $20 and in 10 days, my cost, according to Claude code's cost tracker is like $400, which actually doesn't include all the use I've done.
Which is to say, if I continue my current usage over the month, I'll be getting $1000 of Claude for $20. It's difficult to be mad at someone selling me a $20 for two quarters, even if they're putting a bunch of restrictions on how and when I can do that.
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 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.
funnily enough for me, Fable 5 was much better at refactoring my large codebase than Opus 4.8 was - perhaps the scope of Fable is very great
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 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.
Haven’t played with alternative harnesses. What’s broken in your opinion and what benefit brings pi for you?
How is the harness broken?
its bloated, try /radio
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.
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.
Can we just make Opus 4.8 ish models cheaper, they do exactly what I want for 99% of problems certainly in web app development. I’m not sure what Palantir/Salesforce/agencies will do, really upset for these leaches!
Glad it's back, but the price outside of the subscription is insane. API pricing is just not for regular users.
I wonder who in their right mind will pay for this lobotomised junk.
That didn't take long.
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.
> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5[1m]). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.
I'm not getting the Opus 4.8 switch for coding, supposedly given how fast I reached the usage limit, which is kind of nice.
correction: opus 4.8 is rebadged as fable, fable is not back
This is getting served with a certificate Firefox says was created by an unknown issuer. It's possible I'm getting hit by a corporate middle-box, but then I'd expect to get this on every single host name.
twitter? are u sure it's not ur corporate?
Update: It is my company's middleware box. I'm not sure why I'm not seeing this flagged on other sites.
Update2: They're blocking all (not HN!) social media now because someone got catfished on whatsapp or something.
those MITM firewalls can have different configurations for different sites
Maybe they are blocking just Claude?
What’s the fable of this story?
Did they remove that policy that forces retention of data for fable, even if you use it on AWS or elsewhere
Nope
Definitely NOT a marketing ploy.
Yes, just like New Coke back in the 80s. Genius 4D marketing strategy.
By the gods! The next 20 minutes will be the most consequential of my life ...
For how long?
A week
Here we go!
Might need a few more Claude subscriptions.
Now the Chinese models can start the distilling process again so I can get a better small parameter local model.
> 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.
This is the real story.
This is pure nonsense. I asked it to edit one (long) html file, and it used up 5 hour session limit and it didn't even finish. For comparison, same task with Gemini Pro 3.1 Thinking took like 5% of usage. Similar with Codex 5.3.
Strangely enough, cancelled the subscription listed the reason, and after 15 minutes session limit is back to zero.
Anthropics marketing dept were a tad overzealous with how they positioned this model, now it's biting them back.
If this was just another model without the hype doom marketing, I don't think we'd be where we are.
Was confused, thinking I somehow missed the release of the game Fable 4, only to be disappointed when I saw this is about Claude LLM crap.
Peter Molyneux continues to re-invent himself. His newest "god game" claims to have the ability to code any game you like, on demand. Just as you'd expect from an omnipotent deity!
It's kind of like that time "crypto" changed it's meaning to cryptocurrencies and NFTs.
If the future of SOTA is handicaped models, then what's the point?
Writing code is already okay for current open models like GLM, QWEN.
I only need SOTA models for slop reviews, clean-ups and helping me with things I am not good at.
I have been extremelly happy with the results of cheaper models recently.
Composer 2.5 is a beast, fast and cheap. The upcoming Grok will probably be even better, since cursor helped trainning it.
Anthropic will lose market share quickly if they can't do better than this fable shit show...
They also announced a promotional offer in here: [0]
> For a limited time, you can use our newest model—Claude Fable 5—at no extra cost as part of your subscription plan.
> During the promotional period, you can use up to 50% of your weekly subscription limits on Claude Fable 5 at no extra cost.
So it lasts for a week until July 7, 2026 at 11:59:59 PM PT. Then they will pull the plug on that.
So it sounds like a great time to roll the dice, pull that lever, spin that roulette wheel and spend as many tokens as possible, at no extra cost at the Anthropic casino's latest upgraded slot machine called Fable 5.
Available to gamblers while capacity and availability lasts. Most importantly have fun and don't blow up your budget.
[0] https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15424964-claude-fable...