We're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12

https://twitter.com/claudeai/status/2074548242386178258

by minimaxir • 15 days ago

232 254 15 days ago

https://xcancel.com/claudeai/status/2074548242386178258

minimaxir• 15 days ago

Previously, access was set to expire today (July 7th)

It is theorized that OpenAI may time the release of GPT 5.6 in Codex to convert people who have lost access to Fable, so this is an interesting game theoric consequence.

handfuloflight• 15 days ago

It was foreseen.

bathory• 15 days ago

It is, many people are hungry for GPT-5.6, considering it is supposed to be Fable class, with lower costs. Many Claude users were ready to jump ship.

roncesvalles• 15 days ago

Also consider that Fable launched on June 9. Many people including myself bought a 1-month Anthropic subscription just to use Fable.

By extending it to July 12, they're gonna get a second month out of a lot of such people. If it really expired today, I wasn't going to renew my month.

onion2k• 15 days ago

It's also possible that giving access to Fable when lots of people have been taking time away from working on things (4th July, World Cup, etc) meant they didn't spend much time with it.

testycool• 15 days ago

I was rushing to make the most of Fable today, and I'm at 67%, with limit reset on July 11th.

If would've used it more moderately if I had known in advance.

internet2000• 15 days ago

Same here. 20% usage already with just half a day usage. Wish they'd commit to keeping it on Max, even if severely limited.

dsmurrell5• 15 days ago

Same here, I'm at 98% :(

They think they're giving you something when they're actually taking something away.

hbarka• 15 days ago

Looks like we are at the end of the frontier-level models at subscription pricing. After this grace period, it will be double the cost at paid-per-token usage. I’m counting on the other models to compete at the subscription level and I need my harness to be agnostic. I need an AI harness that lets me switch LLM models dynamically depending on the task.

skeledrew2• 15 days ago

I need an AI harness that lets me switch LLM models dynamically depending on the task.

OpenRouter put up something about this a few days ago. Check out their Advisor and Subagent docs.

jauntywundrkind2• 15 days ago

Rather smart way to keep a bunch of subscriptions subscribed.

I still feel a bit salty I got so much less out of the time I thought I was buying. And I stayed up late asking Fable for what giant leaps and potentials and architectural rewrites might benefit various side projects, so I kind of got what I wanted.

But I'll probably keep one of my pro accounts, for just a bit more usage.

dicey• 15 days ago

I half expected OpenAI to make GPT 5.6 available today, just to tempt people to switch over. Either way, I'm glad Fable is staying accessible, it's been fun.

gorgmah• 15 days ago

Now I'm wondering if the 84% probability of GPT-5.6 release on polymarket on july 9th is about to drop substantially (in order to release while fable is at extra cost, like everyone seems to anticipate)? If they miss thursday release, does it mean they'll release Sol on next tuesday?

freedomben• 15 days ago

The opacity and unpredictability of Anthropic is really starting to become more than just an annoyance. I'm glad they're extending access, but the roller coaster is really starting to cause whiplash.

If they're eventually going to add Fable to the subscription plan, I wish they'd say something about that now, or at least confirm if they don't plan to for awhile. The feeling I get is they don't want to make any announcements because they are flying by the seat of their pants and want to see what their competition does first.

dboreham2• 15 days ago

They have an IPO to launch, so they're not going to do that.

gck12• 15 days ago

I have a really hard time understanding how anyone is ready to pay $200/mo to be put on such a rollercoaster all the time.

I've used fable, it's great. But nothing beats predictability - ever.

This truly feels like some form of emotional abuse/manipulation at this point.

winwang• 15 days ago

I would pay $200/mo for Opus 4.8 already. Fable 5 is just a cherry on top (although, without it, Codex 5.5 is the better buy imo).

hosel• 15 days ago

Oh gee $2000 worth of tokens from the best available model for $200 wonder how people shell out that kind of cash

DonsDiscountGas• 15 days ago

I pay that much and don't even use Fable because everything I do involves biology

Kim_Bruning• 15 days ago

I feel your pain. Apparently I still do a lot of biology in my day-to-day and in my thinking, so fable jumps the tracks a lot for me.

cjbgkagh5• 15 days ago

I would pay vastly more, I think it’s incredible value. If I had no other choice I think I’d pay up to $1K per day. The amount of work I’m getting through is absolutely immense.

laichzeit0• 15 days ago

Same. I don’t know what Mickey Mouse work people are doing that 4.8 is “enough”. CRUD apps maybe?

I have some serious Bayesian statistical research programs running and Fable is on another level than 4.8. It feels like Andrew Gelman is supervising it. Even the vision model on Fable is superior to 4.8 which is great for having it digest research papers.

brookst3• 15 days ago

I pay $200/mo because my opus usage alone is >$10k/mo at api rates. Do you think I’m making a mistake?

Culonavirus2• 15 days ago

I read posts like these all the time and I keep wondering when they'll begin to tighten the screws on the prosumers. I think most, if not all, $200/mo individual accounts are blasting high multiples of that amount in tokens. I mean we know that doesn't work with current inference costs, not by a longshot, so I guess this is just a way to pad their numbers like "look, we're growing our user base!" while they can still somewhat hide the "actually, we're hemorrhaging money on inference" in their accounting.

dboreham2• 15 days ago

I pay $200/mo and they provide me a tool that writes all the code I want. Seems like a great deal to me.

micw• 15 days ago

Paying $100/month and using Opus 4.8 all the time to get my work done. I had a brief look at fable (when it was available the 1st time) but it burned my allowance to fast. So I keep paying the $100 for Opus and enjoy friction-less uninterrupted work.

I'm usually at 60-70% usage at the end of a 5 hour window, that's the pace where I can still think about what to delegate and what to expect and verify the results. Could probably go faster but that would have a significant impact on output quality.

Computer04• 15 days ago

Very expensive, not sure how it fits in with many companies seemingly trying to get employees using models at about Sonnet tier pricing. I certainly would never pay API rates for it, using ccusage I am seeing myself "use" $150-$400 worth of fable per day. (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/tesla-caps-employee-...)

andai3• 15 days ago

That's funny. Sonnet is not great in my opinion. I mean, it often amazes me with its creativity, and I do prefer its style over most bigger models from other providers.

But it also constantly just does dumb things that make me slap my forehead. Opus is a lot better but the slap ratio has not reached 0 yet. Fable seems a bit better there, more testing needed.

But yeah, VC money ran out, now we wait for Moore's Law... :)

Re: Sonnet-ish-pricing. GLM-5.2 is cheaper than that, and appears to be "Opus-ish" in quality. I've been having a reasonably fine time with it. My experience is that it's "very solid for small and medium tasks", haven't tested it for anything bigger though.

Computer04• 15 days ago

I use GLM 5.2 through Opencode Go, but find it to be quite slow when you get to higher contexts (80k+) through their provider so I have not been able to test too much.

andai3• 14 days ago

Do you have numbers for how much you were spending on Opus before with ccusage?

If tokens are equal, Fable should only be twice as expensive, but I think it does a lot more work by default.

Computer04• 13 days ago

Fable has seen an increase of at least 3x daily spend on my part, but it is also easier for me to reach my limit on my plan, so maybe I am just making more use of my limits?

cromka2• 15 days ago

I think HN deserves a collective round of applause on this one: almost everyone here predicted this would happen.

fearmerchant• 15 days ago

For coding Opus 4.8 with ultracode is near perfect and doesn't grind away as many tokens. Fable is advertised as 2x the tokens but in my experience it is closer to 5x what I burn with Opus 4.8.

andai3• 15 days ago

Do you mean in tokens or in $?

cjbgkagh5• 15 days ago

I only use Fable on things Opus 4.8 would struggle too much with, and as my harness improves that’s less and less. That or they dialed up the intelligence on Opus.

cjbgkagh5• 8 days ago

This is no longer true in that I’ve now completed the bulk of my easy work the residual is the tough stuff that Opus cannot do and even Fable struggles with it.

cyanydeez• 15 days ago

...because there's not enough token addicts and we need a proper set of whales.

dsmurrell5• 15 days ago

Hmm, so I planned to use all my allowance in 6 hours time (the time they said it would be around until) for the week and then they extend it so that I burned almost all of them in a wasteful way without having the time to review things properly.

isaac77• 15 days ago

I believe these labs really nailed the restrictions on independence for these models. I have seen collegues coding bs with fable 5. Genuinely, the skill issues is feel by the agent and the output is alike

goplayoutside• 15 days ago

https://xcancel.com/claudeai/status/2074548242386178258

dsmurrell5• 15 days ago

I planned to use all my allowance in 6 hours time (the time they said it would be around until) for the week and then they extend it so that I burned almost all of them in a wasteful way without having the time to review things properly.

krackers• 15 days ago

If they were going to do this, they must have known a few days in advance. Feels intentional.

dsmurrell5• 15 days ago

It does.

cjbgkagh5• 15 days ago

This is the second time you posted essentially the same message 40 minutes later, are you stuck in a loop? I wonder if people are looping in addition to their AI agents.

ValentineC• 15 days ago

I'm guessing dang might have merged some of the submissions.

dsmurrell5• 15 days ago

I queued it up with Fable, now my limit is reached. What do you use your limits for? To check other people's comments on various threads? :)

mil224• 15 days ago

If they pair this with a reset, then it will be good news. Otherwise we all just rushed to use our quota before the July 7th deadline for nothing.

Corollary: use your quota now because a reset seems likely.

yulker• 15 days ago

it's incredible how volatile the product and pricing situation is right now. i struggle to find an equivalent industry that has been so all over the place and obtuse

usef-• 15 days ago

I suspect it's the combination of wanting to capture market share (subsidised plans), being severely capacity limited in GPUs, and having bursty and absurd growth rates. There was speculation that Anthropic might be allocating fewer GPUs to training for a few days to allow people to use Fable.

The actual API pricing seems far more of a stable downward trend, if measuring by equivalent intelligence.

scubadude• 15 days ago

i struggle to find an equivalent industry that has been so all over the place and obtuse

No surprises, it's fundamentally built on promises and lies

GaunterODimm• 15 days ago

Yes, especially in light of possible GPT-5.6, any day now. No reset = easy switch to 5.6. nobody wants to drop that usage.

bdelmas3• 15 days ago

I wonder if they are not just gonna wait that GPT-5.6 is released before doing any move.

alfg3• 15 days ago

I used up all my Fable credits over the weekend. Looks like mine just reset today.

jauntywundrkind2• 15 days ago

I kind of think they force reset last week. Which actually instead of giving me two weekly cycles of use only gave me a single week of use.

Every single thing about this is fuck users fuck your usage. All those subscriptions I bought to enjoy Fable for the time allotted? Basically gone, didn't get to use the ~4 weeks if cycles or so I had planned for, bought, anticipating. I got two. And now if I want one week more, I need to pay for a full month.

Anthropic is just the most miserable evil grinch. Everything here has totally defied everything that's been laid out for what we were told we'd get and gotten worse and worse, with less and less. Anthropic cannot general an iota of goodwill.

nickandbro4• 15 days ago

Loosing Fable July 12th and getting usage cut by a third post July 13th is going to be rough. Looks like all the reporting about Anthropic trying their earnest to turn a profit this quarter is true. In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex. Their Pro plan gives you amble usage and only runs close when you are using the fast mode. And even if you run out of credits, they have given users so many credit resets this past month that you can just activate one of those after. I understand Fable is a great model, but switching to API usage will run many people thousands of dollars with the same usage from their subscription plans. Not worth it IMO.

EDIT: corrected usage cut amount

robgough2• 15 days ago

What makes you think your usage is getting cut by 50% post July 13th? It's just that you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable right now, and that is what is going away.

I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.

nickandbro4• 15 days ago

https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054639777685934564

I guess to be more accurate, usage wouldn't get cut 50% but rather by 33.3% post July 13th.

user3939382• 15 days ago

Subscription is ~$200/month. When I tried running on tokens it was ~$500/day for the same usage pattern.

My guess is my usage is atypically high, but even if the average equivalent is $100-250/day you can get a sense of how much Anthropic is subsidizing subscriptions as a loss leader to lock market share. IMHO this is a doomed strategy since open models will get into a long tail of parity and they’ll ultimately essentially be in the business of commodity compute.

theptip3• 15 days ago

I think you need to consider how much dev mindshare you get from the loss-leader. Claude has grown at an insane rate. They brought vibe-coding mainstream.

At some point they might decide they have enough demand and inertia from enterprise to reduce the subsidy. But to say “it’s doomed” really misses the fact that it has already been immensely successful.

oezi• 15 days ago

I track the subscription value against API rates and you get between 13-20k at current rates. When Fable launched I got 32k for a short time. 500 USD per day is thus very little.

andxor• 15 days ago

What makes you think the API costs are "the true price" and anywhere near their inference costs? Also what percentage of users do you think actually maxes out their subscription?

I suspect they're subsidizing a lot less than people think.

miki1232112• 15 days ago

Anthropic and OpenAI are really two different businesses in one company.

One business is serving great models via the API. I think that one is indeed going to become commoditized. The other is making consumer / developer focused products like Chat GPT, Claude Code or Codex.

Anthropic is leaning hard into making Claude Code work with things like enterprise compliance policies. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one of these companies basically ends up as a SaaS fronting many different models for different capability points, some of which are open.

KronisLV• 15 days ago

Using Opus 4.8 on their Max 5x plan (108 EUR with VAT) would have cost me around 4600 EUR at API rates: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48684539

I also compared them against GLM Coding Plan (cause everyone was positive of the model): https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/z-ai-s-glm-5-2-is-a-great-model... and Anthropic still gives you a bit more tokens despite having some of the presumably most expensive to train and run models.

rcfox2• 15 days ago

This is the first I'm hearing about a usage cut. Do you have a link to an announcement for this? Search hasn't shown anything.

nickandbro4• 15 days ago

Yeah it's right here:

https://x.com/ClaudeDevs/status/2054639777685934564

It's not phrased as a usage cut, but rather when their 50% higher limits ends.

EDIT: its 33.3% less usage after July 13th

alwillis2• 15 days ago

Looks like all the reporting about Anthropic trying their earnest to turn a profit this quarter is true.

That's not how any of this works.

Anthropic is playing the long game; they're not going make a short-sighted decision just so they announce a profit for one quarter, which doesn’t mean much because it won’t be a sustainable profit since they're going to need to spend a ton of money on training and compute over the next few months.

That's why they did a G funding round for $14 billion in February and $65 billion in May.

I suspect one reason for switching Fable to API usage for the near future is they don't have enough compute for their enterprise customers and every hobbyist on their $20/month Pro plan, 80% of which don’t need Fable 5 anyway but that won't stop them from using it as much as they can.

nickandbro4• 15 days ago

which doesn’t mean much because it won’t be a sustainable profit since they're going to need to spend a ton of money on training and compute over the next few months.

Never was arguing that it would be a sustained profit, just that they are. Most likely for the reasons you just listed.

jatora4• 15 days ago

Short term higher profit for IPO

eli_gottlieb• 15 days ago

In the mean time, I will gladly switch to Codex.

IME Codex had a bit of a big head/ego about writing what it thinks I ought to want rather than what I actually ask for, and I've had to spend some time cleaning up its slop.

JumpCrisscross2• 15 days ago

I've been on Anthropic's subscription product for a few months. I pay annually.

I miss Kagi's multi-model product [1]. Anthropic's nonsense around releasing, deprecating, optimising/lobotomising is tiring, and isn't matched by the value of running different models against each other.

Fable has been fine. But its reliablity is crap. The constant downgrading is crap. This last-minute promotional windowing reeks of JCPenney pre-bankruptcy, not a trusted tool. I hate the Electron app–it's slow and ugly and shows Claude isn't trusted by its own makers with app development. I'm using 4.8 instead of dealing with the pop-ups saying my asking why basil browns is causing my account to be downgraded, and I'm still not sure if that's a nerfed 4.7.

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/ultimate-plan.html

throwatdem12311• 15 days ago

The drug dealer sample strategy seems to work good for them.

replwoacause2• 15 days ago

Does it? Maybe. But I've grown weary of it. It feels like I'm in a relationship with a mercurial partner, never quite knowing where I stand.

Quothling2• 15 days ago

I think it does. I know this is through Microsoft, but they give you a month free of Cowork which is currently Opus 4.8 (or at least they did for us) and I doubt we'd ever go back. When I say "we" it's the enterprise organisation "we", but this also where this sort of spending won't stop anyone. I can't go into exact details, but if our first month had not been free, then our most expensive user would've hit around $1000, while our average (among users who've adopted it and actually use it) is around $100. Neither of those numbers would matter in a budget.

I've had the pleasure of setting up limits because Microsoft needed billing policies before our C-levels have even gotten it on their agenda. So I set up a sort of conservative $200 personal limit, but then setup a $1m shared limit pool that anyone can be moved into with management approval. I suspect our limits will be much higher than this once the C-levels make the decision on an actual company policy. I think we'll see these spending limits mainly used as guardrails to prevent accidental spending, but that there will not really be a ceiling, just some approval gates. Some managers are already requesting usage reports, but not to track spending, they want to see who uses too little AI.

This is the difference between enterprise and small companies and individuals. When you spend $500k a month keeping your toilets stacked with papertowels, toiletpaper, soap etc. then $1m a month on AI isn't going to raise any eyebrows.

linsomniac2• 15 days ago

Man, this "Fable" has been rough. Last week we get access to it again, then they reset usage after a day or two with no warning. Lots of "missed" Fable time because I was pacing it for a reset 5 days down the line. Use up all my Fable time last week, resets Sunday and I don't have enough work projects to burn up the tokens by today, so I burn them on some toy and side projects, which I wouldn't have done if I knew I was going to have it until Sunday. Now I'm at 100% and they give out more access.

It would have been WAY more useful for them to announce the extension, you know, yesterday. This is basically the worst time for them to announce it. Bunch of goobers, who thought this would be a good idea?

JumpCrisscross2• 15 days ago

Use up all my Fable time last week

I'm spending more time catering to Fable and Anthropic's B.S. than solving problems with Fable. I'm increasingly convinced not getting this deeply baked into single models and going back deep learning on topics of interest is both more fun and useful. (This week: chlorophyll chemistry under heat, also the Sri Lankan civil war.)

linsomniac2• 15 days ago

Kind of shooting themselves in the foot here. In the process of getting all my Fable use in, I'm also at 68% on overall week limit and 5 days left. So not only am I likely to be using OpenAI much more heavily this week, I'm going to be doing it while being slightly annoyed at Anthropic.

Salgat• 15 days ago

Anthropic wants companies that use API billing. Their growth period through hooking individual users who bring it to the business is over.

jofzar• 15 days ago

Unless they change it so there's no data training/retention for fable, I don't even understand what company is using API fable.

fcanesin• 15 days ago

Anthropic: reminder that DeepSeek-V4 GA version is expected to debut on July 13 as showcase for the release of the Huawei Ascend 950dt

spyware_suburbs• 15 days ago

The most frustrating part is that everyone thought the access was ending on the seventh and used it up as much as possible only to have them say oh by the way on the 12th you can it'll go away and so you can keep using it. No one has any more fable usage tokens left? We all used it up they should've also reset people's weekly usage.

Sevii• 15 days ago

On July 12th they will extend it again.

brookst3• 15 days ago

Perhaps. I don’t blame them for short horizons given capacity constraints, government mayhem, etc. Promising anything more than a week at a time seems fraught.

seer• 15 days ago

Getting on and off fable this week has been quite interesting. For my personal work stream (big terraform monorepo, hundreds of states) I’ve using mostly superpowers to do heavy / quality work. But with fable, I tried just telling it what to do, and it produced roughly the same results without a big structured back and forth that I was accustomed to.

Then after using up all my fable allowance I figured let’s see if opus can actually work without superpowers, and no, it was all over the place doing weird things.

Thing is, superpowers produces meticulous specs and plans as a byproduct of its work, which is very useful for switching between work trees, stoping / resuming work by different people.

But to do that in Fable you have to spend way more tokens than it’s reasonable. You get similar quality result, but without the specs in between.

I’m not super sad that I’ll have to go back to opus though, with superpowers it was Fable but more structured. But I will miss the banter though - Fable is amazing for brainstorming big underspecced features.

try-working• 15 days ago

This is an interesting comment because it makes me want to ask the question, what is the use for fable then? For me, GPT 5.4 is enough when using recursive-mode. I do appreciate GPT 5.5 Pro for some larger research, architecture, planning tasks though. I think that's what Fable is for. A very small % of total work.

matheusmoreira5• 15 days ago

what is the use for fable then?

Cybersecurity hardening. The one thing they don't allow the model to do.

RSZC• 15 days ago

A very small % of total work.

That seems valid in today's world. Right now it's expensive, slow, and accurate. I imagine in the fairly near future it will be cheap, slow, and accurate, and that'll be a great opportunity to let it run on anything time-insensitive.

Re current use-cases: in addition to planning, there's also some tasks which Opus just can't complete but Fable can. Multiple times I've spent hours in combination w/ Opus trying to debug some particularly nasty nondeterministic issue, only to have Fable nail it in 20mins while I walk the dog.

notatoad• 15 days ago

planning tasks though. I think that's what Fable is for.

this is how i've been using it, and where i've found it really excels over anything else i've tried. get fable to write a plan, and get something cheaper to follow the plan. the code fable writes isn't significantly better than the code opus writes, as long as they're both following the same plan. but a plan written by fable is much better.

ricksunny• 15 days ago

What is the use of a genius who does great work but doesn’t document their results, only produces them? How much do companies enjoy having a structural dependency on someone like that?

chvid• 15 days ago

(Not a Claude user) What is "superpowers"?

ahofmann• 15 days ago

https://github.com/obra/superpowers

steve_adams_863• 15 days ago

I like super powers because I can be more in the loop editing and understanding the plan. Letting fable loose is genuinely impressive, and probably perfect for vibe coding, but I can’t be that far away from the plan and steps for code that matters.

As for being great for vibe coding, it’s cool but I can’t justify that kind of cost for throwaway code. At this point I’ve had good experiences using fable to review code, but I’m totally content with opus for all of my workflows still. If fable was the same price I’d switch (for projects not involving biology, at least), but I’d still use something like super powers to stay in the loop.

marcus_holmes• 15 days ago

This. My workflow is a heavily-modified and personalised superpowers, and the docs that it produces are an asset. I tried Fable and it just ran off and did shit. Mostly that was good shit, but not all, and I would have liked to have had some input to those decisions.

I realise this is just me needing to structure my use of Fable better. But I got to a really nice place with my Opus workflow and I'm reluctant to go through that every time a new model releases.

jnaina• 15 days ago

for the first time, I'm rooting for the chinese to break the american monopoly on AI. although I have gemini, anthropic and openai subscriptions, I just opened an OpenRouter account and will be using more chinese open weights going forward.

bdelmas3• 15 days ago

It’s only a question of time. I think right now 60% of AI paper published is from China. They are already the bests at cost optimization

alecco• 15 days ago

IMHE the models work much better if you go directly to the creator's API. DeepSeek V4 official API gives me 8x better caching so it was 40% cheaper in my case. Unless it bothers you China gets your data instead of giving it to the American VC-backed companies.

It also prefer to give my money to the pro-social companies giving away their open models (they cost many millions) instead of opportunists who don't give much back.

kelnos• 15 days ago

Still definitely not trying it if I'm gonna lose access on my subscription plan.

"First hit is free", indeed.

nh43215rgb• 15 days ago

does it matter much? i find my claude code experience always downgraded from fable to opus anyway.

somenameforme3• 15 days ago

Does this affect anybody? It seems they didn't reset your Fable usage so this only applies to people who didn't hit their 50%-of-plan limit with Fable and I can't imagine that's many people given how this thing eats through tokens like that's its job. On Pro I generally could not complete a single plan+execution cycle without hitting my token cap, so that 50% of weekly limit got eaten up fast and I assume that's the typical case.

I suppose it benefits people whose weekly reset is sometime between now and the 12th? Feels like vibe management, because I find this part of the promo more annoying than not.

phinnaeus• 15 days ago

I can't imagine that's many people

Well, I don't know how many people it is but I certainly haven't bothered to use it except once or twice. What's the point in getting used to it as a daily driver when it won't be available in perpetuity?

But in any event, you're still right that it won't affect those of us in that camp.

matheusmoreira5• 15 days ago

It's still good for code review though. Would've been better were it not for the obnoxious cybersecurity filters that prevent the model from hardening the code.

Lots of people are trying to get the most value out of it before it goes away.

bdelmas3• 15 days ago

I was planning on using it all until today so I burned quite a lot yesterday.

nevi-me2• 15 days ago

I maximised usage and have reached the limit. I feel like I did 2 week's worth of hobby work over the last few days.

I got Fable to write multiple plans, spent a great part of the weekend reviewing them. Then with superpowers I left must of those plans executing with little intervention over the past few days.

I struggled to get Opus to just keep going without trying to convince me that it's late.

donw• 15 days ago

I'm really curious, what sort of work you were having it do such that you could execute multiple days of work with minimal supervision.

randsorex2• 15 days ago

"I don't use fable, I just read about it on social media. I read it is all hype and marketing so I don't believe you"

-- 50% of this forum

Retr0id• 15 days ago

Personally, I forgot the initial deadline was so soon and hadn't found anything to use it for yet.

isodev• 15 days ago

I tried it but the difference to Opus didn’t seem to justify the extra cost and stress around these limits.

The Max plan at 180€/month excl VAT already comes up for budget review every time. Not sure any sort of increase will be tolerated at all.

alfg3• 15 days ago

I used up all my Fable credits over the weekend and looks like it’s completely reset as of today.

somenameforme3• 15 days ago

That's just going to be the weekly roll-over for you being well timed. I'm at 100% - quite annoying.

replwoacause2• 15 days ago

I can honestly say that as a paying customer, I'm getting a bit tired of being jerked around by this company. It's on again, off again. Snip snap snip. And by the way, telling people there's a deadline so they all scramble to use their "Fable allowances" before being cut off, only to then be told "just kidding, here's 5 more days" without getting a usage reset is just another frustrating and disappointing customer experience.

Seriously, all OAI needs to do at this point is just release GPT 5.6, have it be a solid model and then not jerk it out of the hands of their customers, and they're going to eat Anthropic's lunch.

mil224• 15 days ago

Agreed, but let's not forget to put at least some of the blame on the Trump administration for the export control fiasco.

jaykru• 15 days ago

They begged publicly, multiple times to be regulated. This is before even mentioning the gross exaggeration of their model's dangerous capabilities.

matheusmoreira5• 15 days ago

Anthropic literally asked for it.

nadermx• 15 days ago

Sure not the best user experience. But maybe they thought compute was gonna be more, or maybe fable helped them optimize under load.

matheusmoreira5• 15 days ago

I'm tired too. I'll switch to OpenAI if Sol is available on subscription models.

nullbio7• 15 days ago

Cancel your subs. Anthropic does not value or respect its customers at all.

g42gregory• 15 days ago

I am using Opis 4.8 xhigh, in OMP.sh coding agent (full agent built on Pi), with Matt Pocock Skills installed.

I don’t see a particular bump in code quality from Fable 5. In fact, it feels less reliable to me than my current setup. No sure why I am not seeing what everybody else is seeing.

Perhaps OMP/Pi (head and shoulders better than Claude Code) + Matt Pocock Skills already encode all the agentic improvements Fable has?

aenis2• 15 days ago

Opus 4.8 xhigh is my daily driver for everything. I'd say Fable's edge is visible when designing for a complex problem with no obvious, idiomatic solutions. It is good at greenfield designs, and good at pointing out the pros and cons of hard design choices. I now do designs with Fable, and do implementations off those designs with Opus. Pretty happy. For a while I was using Fable for everything, but burned through a lot of real money for not much value, I think for coding its slow and not at all better than Opus.

mavamaarten• 15 days ago

I had the same sentiment. In my limited testing, it didn't perform any better than Opus at all. It wasn't a particularly challenging taskset either, mostly just "add this simple feature" with plenty of context and very clearly defined scope. It worked functionally but there were much better and simpler approaches available. For the cost, I don't see how Fable can ever be worth it.

leobuskin2• 15 days ago

@anthropic, can you finally add $800-$1000 per month plan and allow us to work instead of tracking your weekly changes and dramas? I think, we (individuals, small-medium biz, first of all) did our best to help you train the model like Fable. Enterprise-level lockdown (and API costs define this) is... unfair? I mean, we all knew that you all will just use us, but it's AI, right? For people, right? Right?

The only reason this is happening -> someone (US gov?) decided that it's time to bail out those who would inevitably die within a year or two otherwise, middlemen.

psyclobe• 15 days ago

Seriously, just let me fucking pay to get steady service 24/7.

sroussey• 15 days ago

Use console and pay API rates. Very predictable.

AuthAuth• 15 days ago

American Tech companies hate their users

altmanaltman• 15 days ago

There is absolutely 0 chance Anthropic or OpenAI will get a government bailout (it might still happen in this admin but it makes no sense). These companies are not like banks which are fundamentally important to the economy. Sure AI is important but Google is not going to die. Why would you save OpenAI and Anthropic when google, amazon or microsoft can just gobble them up when/if needed?

The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM. It might change in the future but for now that is true. This was exactly the reverse with banking, everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow

pfannkuchen• 15 days ago

everyone would lose their own money if the banks just disappear tomorrow

Sure, but only because banks are legally allowed to lie to customers about how much money they have.

shaewest• 15 days ago

If you look at it from the perspective of the current US administration, they see that almost all GDP growth in the past year(?) has been related to data center growth. If all of a sudden that industry is gone, you're looking at GDP stagnation or drop that looks terrible for the current party, hence the potential for a bailout.

Personally I hold the opinion that the investment into data centers would shift into something else, so no real GDP drop, but I'm not sure that's a certainty the same as 'bailout keeps the current story going'

leobuskin2• 15 days ago

That's not a bailout for AI labs, I meant the "bailout" for Salesforce and others. There's absolutely no place for them in the world where we have Fable+ models. For many of them. Most of them (we just didn't get this feeling yet). Someone just trying to maintain the old world order, that's all. I don't think US economy would fail if those absolutely useless giants would go down.

fragmede• 15 days ago

The average taxpayer gets 0 benefits from LLM.

Sure they do. Someone they know is using AI to ask for help with something, which makes their life easier, which makes things easier on them as well, which is a benefit.

bbor• 15 days ago

Thank you, Anthropic. This random drop in the bucket wants you to know that this was a big deal for them!

winterbourne• 15 days ago

Everyone scrambling to max their usage before the deadline may have given Anthropic some valuable data on exactly how much compute they can handle. The extension could also be a play to minimize the effect of OpenAI's next move.

Even if they grant a reset, the ball is now in OpenAI's court.

ozozozd• 15 days ago

This reality show kind of bored me already. I haven’t even made an attempt to use Fable 5.

Is it so amazing? Or is it the “intermittent reward” and exclusivity driving people to use it?

nullbio7• 15 days ago

It's just empty hype. It's mildly better than Opus 4.8 at best.

sunaookami• 14 days ago

You've never used it

yieldcrv• 15 days ago

like a fent plug on Market st

gwd• 15 days ago

Anyone understand what the point is of only extending it for 5 days?

rootatixww32• 15 days ago

easier to plan/estimate compute for 5 days than for a month. worst case you only have 5 "unprofitable" days

zeafoamrun• 15 days ago

Why don't they just continue to give you Fable access but have it use quota at 4x or 8x so they at least let people on plans continue to use it, even a little?

I'm already using it judiciously because I tried ultracode with it and it ate my 5h quota while only getting halfway through the problem.

pkaye• 15 days ago

I have a feeling they are waiting for the upcoming ChatGPT release to decide.

Khaine• 15 days ago

The drug dealers are giving out a bit more of a free hit to get people hooked on the more expensive models.

charcircuit• 15 days ago

It's not free. It uses a lot of your quota.

baq2• 15 days ago

$200/mo is the new ‘free’ in the area

aenis2• 15 days ago

Ya, and it works. I now default to Fable-for-the-design, Opus-for-the-build mode, which is sort of cost effective, but I am hooked. Opus does not compare when it comes to architecture, designs and algorithms, esp. for gnarly problems without an obvious compromise-free solution.

asasidh• 15 days ago

Anyone got any usage left to use it ?

morgengold• 15 days ago

Let's be real: Fable 5 on API pricing is so expensive that most solo devs won't be able to use it outside of a pro or max plan. Exceptions might be individuals with highly profitable businesses or mini side projects.

zjsjns• 15 days ago

Only inferior, talentless and lower intelligence developers need to rely on LLMs.

Fortunately, you're all going to be jobless when the AI boom fizzles out and it becomes cost prohibitive to use these products once VCs aren't subsidising it. Then us real developers will be laughing.

theplumber• 15 days ago

I knew this was going to happen. It’s just part of Dario’s hype strategy.

ngsevers• 15 days ago

Anybody else find Fable almost unusable because of the safeguards? I generally can't get more than 2 minutes into a task without it auto-switching back to opus..

pyrex• 15 days ago

I'm in the biomedical field so yes, it drops to Opus 4.8 straight away due to safeguards.

nottorp3• 15 days ago

Same for the dental app I'm working on.

And for the record i'm NOT vibe coding it...

matltc• 14 days ago

Just fyi: you can toggle auto-switching to opus if safeguarded.

Cider9986• 15 days ago

These comments feel like kids and their parent Anthropic.

"For summer, you're becoming a big boy so we've made the decision to increase your allowance."

You are an adult, why are you using a service that treats you like a child?

tmountain• 15 days ago

Cause all the kids are hooked on crack.

mahkeiro• 15 days ago

Fable may be fine but it tripped itself in the security measure and suddenly went to opus in the middle of a rework of a price index where it was improving the correction of past exchange rate… And of course now it hides all the thinking process and just spit out the results.This make it a pain to review the proposed change and underlying reasons. Working for a ling time with that is going to be a nightmare for anyone trying to understand what are the change for and a massive cognitive load.

alex7o3• 15 days ago

This is just a series of ploys to make more marketing about fable. They know that if they make it api only nobody is going to talk about it. And knowing that openai will have a comparable model soon means they need to stir up some hype and make people use/talk about it as much as possible. And bluffing that access will be restricted until a specific date is just marketing. Like saying buy in the next 24 hours get one free.

nottorp3• 15 days ago

Yep, sounds like the usual time pressure tactics. Perhaps because no one's actually trying it.

In the mean time, their vibe coded frontend doesn't actually let me use Fable because it thinks i'm trying to hack open source software. What I'm actually doing is debugging null pointer crashes due to data corruption in the closed source software i work for these days, but no, you dirty hacker, you can't do that.

So let's recapitulate:

- they put out some marketing copy about Fable being a world ending threat for finding security vulnerabilities

- they get banned by the US government, which believes the marketing copy

- they add "safeguards" and the US government allows them to make it public again

- said safeguards make the product useless for their paying customers

greengreengrass• 15 days ago

I’ve consciously not used Fable because I want some usage allowance to remain for the rest of the week. The 2x billing is just too aggressive for me when I tried it (max x20 plan user currently).

bossyTeacher• 15 days ago

Yep, sounds like the usual time pressure tactics. Perhaps because no one's actually trying it.

For your average user, Sonnet is more than enough. Opus will be rarely used. Fable is really something professionals will use and even then with low frequency. The model is really good but the token economics don't make it so appealing to the amount and breadth of people you need to get people talking about Fable the way people talked about Chatgpt in 2022. AI fatigue is here and Anthropic and the like are fighting hopelessly against a rising tide.

alex7o3• 15 days ago

More so my problem is that they are baiting people to burn tokens meaninglessly, when ni need to rush and hurry and try to max out your usage

zaphirplane• 14 days ago

Fable being a world ending threat for finding security vulnerabilities

No that’s the other myth ( some variants of spelling) one

anonzzzies• 14 days ago

I would try it but it goes to opus 4.8 for all we do and so we stopped trying. Our work is not focused on security but obviously, as everything has to, it needs to be audit security. And that will have it change the model.

bellowsgulch• 14 days ago

"pointers?" Someone call the FBI! This guy is hacking!

sagarpatil• 15 days ago

Spot on. OpenAI releases GPT 5.6 on Thursday.

nullbio7• 15 days ago

Agreed. They've been doing this sort of thing since the beginning and it's infuriating that people eat it up. I really despise this company.

subarctic• 14 days ago

That's how i feel about it too. But i haven't used it because there's no point in getting used to a new model if it's just gonna get taken away again. I wonder if they're also doing this to get some sort of signal on which types of users everyone is - for example someone else might always be chasing whatever the best model is

alex7o3• 14 days ago

Oh don't get me wrong I would try to use the best model available (I don't always max out my usage, and a better model leads to less work from mw hypothetically) even when it can be taken away, I just refuse to feel pressured by them.

cloverich• 14 days ago

Also the rerelease of the time limit over the holiday (july 4) was unfortunate, many Americans go offline for extended weekends (ex i was out almost a week). When i originally saw the fable 5 dates i just shrugged ah well guess i wont test it for a while.

outdig2• 14 days ago

seems like they're following after the president!

azalemeth• 15 days ago

I still haven't been able to use Fable. I'm a medical physicist -- it just balks at anything I do and gives me an AUP / safeguard error. Applies even if I docstrip out all the comments in my C code!

noworriesnate2• 14 days ago

Is it because of the type of work you're trying to get Fable to do or because Fable knows you're a medical physicist? I.e. if your CLAUDE.md says "I'm a medical physicist" but you're asking it to write a command line tool to list github prs or something, does it balk at that?

k9294• 15 days ago

Meh... Waiting for OpenAI models without this 5 more days subscription bullshit.

It looks like Anthropic baiting people into Max subscriptions before turning the model off. No thank you.

ocd• 15 days ago

They give me regular access to Fable, or I'm going to unsubscribe and lobby the heavens for Cohere to release a consumer AI service with a lady's name instead of something like "Claude."

nullbio7• 15 days ago

I really hope people cancel their subs once GPT 5.6 drops. This company deserves to sink.

artemonster• 15 days ago

How so?

cromka2• 15 days ago

Because they're not in bed with DoD /s

nullbio7• 14 days ago

https://clawd.rip here's a start.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 14 days ago

I really hope people cancel their subs once GPT 5.6 drops.

I'm planning to subscribe to OpenAI after exhausting weekly usage with Fable. Good timing with GPT new models and might as well take a look at Codex.

While skills can be copy pasted, I'm not sure if the hooks are transferable.

thisisit• 15 days ago

Despite paying for Claude access, I don't use Fable but I find this always changing policy quite exhausting to follow. There is 2x usage, there is no 2x usage, there is 2x usage but only x hours, there is no 2x usage, there is Fable access, there is no Fable access, there is Fable access till x date, there is Fable access till x + y date. This is just exhausting. I just want to open and usage the default model and within limits. That's all I ask.

jve• 15 days ago

I just want to open and usage the default model and within limits. That's all I ask.

Well... doesn't it work just like that, always? Open, prompt, get the result form whatever model your agent extension decides now should be the default one.

CommanderData• 14 days ago

It's pretty deceptive. Sonnet only? Seems to have gone. Older models disappear all the time.

This announcement in May about higher usage limits, changes to peak times https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex. Is this even the case anymore? Or has it changed again. The information needs to be baked into the UI.

I set a hard cap of 200k tokens, with Claude's instructions. The app doesn't even respect this.

Someone might say this information is out there but a definitive source is often hard to find, or tell if it's current. I grow a little more and more resentful with sudden unplanned changes like this and want the day of local LLMs so I'm in full control.

outdig2• 14 days ago

reminds me of a certain orange dude.

_pdp_3• 15 days ago

I couldn't find a situation where Fable was significantly outperforming Opus enough to make me say wow.

I tried to make it fix a browser game that is sort of like a Mario clone. It couldn't. It fumbled in the same places Opus was struggling too. I tried it with other code as well, but I couldn't get any significant performance improvement out of it, except perhaps in improving my account's token burn.

If anything, in my opinion, GLM 5.2 had a better moment than Fable recently. Not because it is better, but because it was not hyped at all, and many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it.

I am not drawing a direct comparison here, because Fable is clearly the better LLM. But GLM 5.2 is a good, honest model, and I think open-weight models will only get better going forward.

GPT 5.6 is claimed to be at a similar level, or even better than Fable. We will see. They don't seem to hype it as much, and I have not read anywhere that anyone found a soul or consciousness inside it. And if it benchmarks well, I would possibly use it more for this very reason.

It reminds me of that story from Nassim Taleb's Incerto series where if you have two surgeons at practically the same level, but one looks like the typical surgeon and the other looks like a butcher, who are you going to choose? Taleb suggests that the answer should probably be the butcher, because to get to the same level while looking the part so much less, they probably had to be much better than the data shows for.

I cannot also understand the hype online claiming that the Fable transitioning to token-based billing after the gratis period is equivalent of being in the permanent underclass. The only impressive demo that I saw was it writing NES games which kind of looked fun but I couldn't find more details and I am not sure if you can get this done with another model - probably you can but nobody is trying.

So great model but it does not have the same effect as Opus 4.5 and Codex which made me feel that there was a stepping-stone change.

GLM 5.2 had that moment though.

scotty79• 15 days ago

many people realised that it is possible to run a serious open-weight model yourself, as long as you can get the hardware to support it

That's not realistic. You'd need non-consumer hardware for a frontier open-weights model. And even if you had such hardware for free. Electricity to run it would cost you more than a sub.

_pdp_3• 15 days ago

When I said "running it yourself" I didn't mean me personally running it at home. That will be unfeasible. A company can afford it though and also a supplier that serves multiple customers can do that as well. In fact, I was talking to a company that does this and the model is fully in UK where we need them to be.

At the end of the day it is about the sense of optionality. We know that this is the business model for almost all open source projects. It is not like you cannot download and run the project yourself and some do for practical reasons, but often times the cloud version is priced such that it is the path of least resistance so people go for that.

randsorex2• 15 days ago

I agreed last week but the more I have used Fable this week the more I am getting use to Fable.

I think the Taleb argument is really a stretch for this situation. I consider Taleb one of my greatest teachers but that kind of Talebism I have grown suspicious of in time.

How many surgeons actually look like a butcher lol.

Much of Taleb is like this that it sounds profound as a thought experiment but so much has just nothing to do with reality. A lot of what he is arguing against he is actually doing a form of.

I love Taleb but he is absolutely full of shit. It is marketing and his brand. The proof he is correct are some vague options trades he made 40 years ago.

_pdp_3• 15 days ago

Fable is better than Opus and I do not think there is much argument there. And yes, it is natural to get used to a new tool and even end up liking it more over time. What I am trying to say is that it does not feel like the step change they are claiming it to be.

I fully agree with your point about Taleb. And yes, it can come across as a bit glib, but the underlying point is not new. Do not judge a book by its cover. That idea exists across many cultures, fables, and stories, so it holds IMHO.

The surgeon example is just an illustration of that idea, and it is a great example because it makes the point memorable. In practice, of course, I agree that most modern surgeons are trained to broadly similar standards and look and act the same, with some outliers and historical exceptions.

minraws• 14 days ago

After some crying over not getting 5.6 access early and losing Fable and then getting it back, after calmly trying out these models again, I am back to thinking they are over hyped and Anthropic and OpenAI is minting marketing from it.

Prompting Fable is a lot easier sure, like you can actually ask it to build X and it will produce something close-ish to X, but there is hardly anything it can do I couldn't before, and it still fails to do basic stuff and I have to redo it.

Especially this threatening to pull access, extending access, limiting access is all signs that point to the fact that either these companies are deeply mismanaged.

So it's mismanaged because there really isn't a viable product but just hype, as oss models catch up and break down need for these full size models I am feeling more certain that it's not even remotely worth betting on AI.

If there was infinite demand as people posit there would be zero needs to extend this, there would be zero need to market it, they could literally stop all marketting and just keep selling shovels and printing money.

This AI will they won't they saga just leaves a horrendously bad taste for me.

I say that as someone working on the tech, and with a lot of belief in AI technologies. I just get pushed more into the thinking that this is all just a big bubble, sure the tech might be real but it just doesn't make sense how it's being wrapped up and sold/presented.

I strongly believe good products sell despite the marketing, for instance Linux won in servers despite alternatives because of its merits, AI should be able to as well.

Why can't I just enjoy the product and why do I have to look for conspiracies I don't know but these companies sure as hell are doing something very shady.

kelvinjps10• 14 days ago

After all the hype about fable 5, I was expecting more. It's just another incremental improvement in their models, nothing out of the world. Yeah it's more "independent" but that's also a problem because I like that Opus prefers to clarify a lot of stuff before going right to the implementation.

deepsquirrelnet• 14 days ago

You've used 92% of your Fable 5 limit · resets Jul 12, 12pm

So generous.

TomJansen• 14 days ago

I work in Bioengineering, and I have never ever had a prompt go through Fable's safety filters. So I have never had the pleasure of using it.

Why release a model with such strict filters? It would be more sensible from a buisness perspective if they had sensible filters in place right away.

abe11o• 14 days ago

$10/$50 is unaffordable sorry. I'm not spending a dime past the max20 plan, I stretched it to make the 1/2 cap work but it's literally too expensive after to even "test" or "explore" at this price it basically has to spit out a functional product in one shot, and despite it being noticeably better than 4.8 its still no where close to that point.

We're extending access to Fable 5 on all paid plans through July 12

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