alt Hacker NewsFable 5 Is Back
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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.
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 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.
Maybe, for some projects, instead of generating code with it, it would be useful to generate a plan and the loop(tests/formal verification),because those take much less tokens than a full project, and than use the loop using the older models ?
I am only a casual Clause (Pro) user and I am confused by the messaging, maybe I'm missing something obvious.
> Until July 7, you can use up to 50% of your plan's weekly usage limit on Fable 5.
Does this mean that being able to use Fable on my subscription is a time-limited promotion? I have a subscription, why can't I just... use the model? Is it the case that going forward a subscription will only give you access to older models and newer ones will require additional payment?
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?
> 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?
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 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.
> 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”.
Not exactly. Every time I ask something using Fable, it switches to Opus. The subjects (and I tried many) seem to be irrelevant.
Basically, I can't use Fable.
I 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 ;)
I have been testing it on my security / firewall appliance (nfSensei) and it's much improved. It's actually proceeding through a complex plan Opus 4.8 proposed.
But then again I have not tested it without a prior model planning as of yet.
Note: fable would fail immediately on any security related topic prior.
It won't even review a cyber security blog post I wrote. Absolutely worthless and pitiful guardrails.
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
Their post detailing the timeline and their actions since reinforce my belief that Anthropic is among the most trustworthy AI companies.
I was wrong, I thought they would only go for B2B already. But instead they will remove it from the subscription and price it at 50$/mtok. Compared to GLM-5.2 for 4.40$ that's quite a gap
I 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
That didn't take long.
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!
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.
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.
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.
correction: opus 4.8 is rebadged as fable, fable is not back
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
By the gods! The next 20 minutes will be the most consequential of my life ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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.