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?

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.