Fable 5 Is Back(twitter.com) |
Fable 5 Is Back(twitter.com) |
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 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.
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.
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.
Update2: They're blocking all (not HN!) social media now because someone got catfished on whatsapp or something.
Might need a few more Claude subscriptions.
If this was just another model without the hype doom marketing, I don't think we'd be where we are.
This is the real story.
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...
> 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...
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 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.
That's enshittification for ya I guess
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 hope they either never make it to IPO or crash violently.
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.
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.
I’m not falling over myself to test out Sonnet 5, but I am very interested in Fable.
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"
> 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?
This is what I see in my Claude Code terminal. I don't feel like that 50% rule was there before?
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".
> 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.
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
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?
Basically, I can't use Fable.
This is precisely what comes to mind when I think “successful”.
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
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…
Cheap pricing is why I use Claude Code. The minute they fumble that, I'm using Chinese models for 90% of the work.
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 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
> 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.
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 creditsCan't wait to try out GPT 5.6 at some point when it comes available.
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.
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.
They stated the desire not to bring it to the subscription.
For now... You never know with these companies.
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.
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?
A worse product could win right now if it simply does as its asked.
Can the harness to auto-rephrase? I imagine, doing so will burn through tokens though.
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.
So now we are supposed to cheer for Opus 5 to be just a mild improvement at best?
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 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?
What a surprisingly beneficial consequence for Anthropic.
Trying to minimize privileged access codebase and was careful not to mention security explicitly.
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.