Fable 5 will default to Opus 4.8 for coding tasks

https://xcancel.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756

by babelfish • 21 days ago

49 30 21 days ago

How can it be legal to charge a higher fee for the Fable model, if most of the usage will default to a cheaper model behind the scenes?

It is one thing if I, as the user, choose to down-level but Claude shouldn't do this on its own.

simianwords• 21 days ago

They are transparent. Don’t use it if you don’t want to. These things shouldn’t be illegal.

karahime• 21 days ago

I agree that it shouldn't be outright illegal, but I will definitely be making the personal choice not to engage with model providers which do this. There's no amount of impressive results that could make me want to secretly pay more for less.

rcr-anti• 21 days ago

Originally at least the switch wasn't silent and whether to halt or auto switch was a setting in Claude Code.

cyanydeez• 21 days ago

because it's all indistinguishable from magic when it's a cloud SaaS.

Not like you can tell the difference if you dont own any of the implementation.

mnmx6t2• 21 days ago

Judging from their site, I think it should be OK:

"You won't be charged Fable prices for rerouted requests. Learn more about how the fallback experience works."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude/fable Under "Safeguards"

bel8• 21 days ago

And what happens if you also get blocked by Opus?

I couldn't find if they refund the tokens for that session or the customer is SOL.

gck13• 21 days ago

This has no mention of what happens to the prompt cache, including the "learn more" link.

Knowing Anthropic, it wouldn't surprise me if it will result in a full cache miss/rewrite at fallback, with potentially up to 1M tokens in the context window.

Salgat• 21 days ago

Using only Fable, if I do /usage it will show both Fable and Opus usage, so I don't think it's charging Fable prices for Opus code gen.

mnmx6t2• 21 days ago

I must admit I was drawn to Claude because of their (obviously successful with me) publicity stunt about "being too dangerous to make widely available", when Mythos came out.

It's a shame because I was really looking forward to use it specifically to find potential security holes in my own software.

That being said, Opus 4.7/4.8 have been quite useful already, especially for finding things in the harder to test, non-happy paths.

If I recall, Fable 5 is supposed to be basically Mythos which falls back to Opus 4.8 when dealing with cybersecurity. I wonder if that also includes "finding bugs that could lead to security exploits".

babelfish• 21 days ago

Yeah, I was very excited for Fable to come back to use it for work after using Opus 4.8, but now I guess I'm just excited for Sol/Terra/Luna (unless they have the same restrictions)

gck13• 21 days ago

It's very likely that OAI models will have even more restrictions. Firstly because now they know what feds will do if you don't tune the safety classifiers towards more false positives and secondly, OAI models were always more restrictive than ANT.

exabrial2• 21 days ago

crikey just use the real link: https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756

lmc• 21 days ago

No thanks

throwawayk7h• 21 days ago

If fable 5 can't do code... what are people using it for?

xg15• 21 days ago

Was wondering the same. So coding, debugging and anything that has to do with cybersecurity or LLM development is blocked. What tasks are left in which Fable 5 is meaningfully better than the predecessors?

exabrial2• 21 days ago

It's beginning to look like giant publicity stunts. A model that can't do what it says it can, overhyped, no way to test.

dude250711• 21 days ago

It's good for pre-IPO PR.

You drop a good old "A new {cool_word}-class model.".

And boom! What are you competitors going to do? Use same classification nomenclature? I don't think so! IPO secured.

tapvt• 21 days ago

Is Opus 4.8 equally or more capabale for the actual mechanics of the coding work?

It seems to me that having a powerful Fable layer for the planning, coordination, orchestration-type work and delegating to a suitable model for the actual execution of "coding tasks" is perfectly appropriate, if that is the case.

rvz• 21 days ago

Now that's what I call a scam.

ChrisArchitect• 21 days ago

[dupe] Discussion on this and the rest of the source post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740771

jascha_eng• 21 days ago

Can't wait for China to pull ahead so we have an end to this bullshit

Kim_Bruning• 21 days ago

This is a testable claim.

Gave it a small coding challenge. It wrote the code just fine.

LoganDark3• 21 days ago

This third-party mirror won't load for me.

That aside, they said "some routine tasks like coding and debugging". Since I'm using it for coding right now and it's notably better than Opus 4.8, I think what they mean is that some coding and debugging tasks will fall back.

andai• 21 days ago

How's it different from Opus in your experience?

LoganDark3• 21 days ago

Fable is a lot more confident making decisions for me. Opus tends to create hacky workarounds rather than thinking through the architecture. The difference is so great that when Fable was withdrawn last month I just stopped using Claude, because I did not want to go back to Opus.

One of my first experiences with Fable was giving it an Opus task and watching it work for more than twice the typical time that Opus works and complete the task to a much higher standard of quality than Opus ever did. That was enough to solidify how much better it is already, but I just keep seeing the difference in everything I do with it.

0xy• 21 days ago

Fable is useless, then. What's the point of re-enabling it exactly?

jimrandomh• 21 days ago

This is a misinterpretation. Fable 5's acceptable use policy has false positives during some coding tasks, and that's what they were talking about. But I've been using it for web dev tasks since it relaunched today, and it's worked fine without fallback.

(On a firmware-customization project involving a ghidra MCP, it triggered and switched to Opus; that was sort of expected.)

Fable 5 will default to Opus 4.8 for coding tasks

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