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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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-...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
$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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Spot on. OpenAI releases GPT 5.6 on Thursday.
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.
seems like they're following after the president!
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.
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.
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.
(Not a Claude user) What is "superpowers"?
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.
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.
> 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.
reminds me of a certain orange dude.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Personally, I forgot the initial deadline was so soon and hadn't found anything to use it for yet.
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.
I used up all my Fable credits over the weekend and looks like it’s completely reset as of today.
> 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.
I was planning on using it all until today so I burned quite a lot yesterday.
The drug dealers are giving out a bit more of a free hit to get people hooked on the more expensive models.
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.
It's not free. It uses a lot of your quota.
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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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I used up all my Fable credits over the weekend. Looks like mine just reset today.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was foreseen.
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.
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!
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?
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?
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.
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.
The drug dealer sample strategy seems to work good for them.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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..
I think HN deserves a collective round of applause on this one: almost everyone here predicted this would happen.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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-...)
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.
I really hope people cancel their subs once GPT 5.6 drops. This company deserves to sink.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Anyone understand what the point is of only extending it for 5 days?
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
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?
$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.
> You've used 92% of your Fable 5 limit · resets Jul 12, 12pm
So generous.
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.
I knew this was going to happen. It’s just part of Dario’s hype strategy.
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?
Anthropic: reminder that DeepSeek-V4 GA version is expected to debut on July 13 as showcase for the release of the Huawei Ascend 950dt
On July 12th they will extend it again.
does it matter much? i find my claude code experience always downgraded from fable to opus anyway.
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.
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.
Anyone got any usage left to use it ?
like a fent plug on Market st
Thank you, Anthropic. This random drop in the bucket wants you to know that this was a big deal for them!
...because there's not enough token addicts and we need a proper set of whales.
https://xcancel.com/claudeai/status/2074548242386178258
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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?
Still definitely not trying it if I'm gonna lose access on my subscription plan.
"First hit is free", indeed.
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.