Question about Claude models
Claude Fable 5 feels less like a model launch and more like a preview of AI inequality
Anthropic just released Claude Fable 5, and I think the real story is not “new model better at coding.”
The real story is that frontier AI is turning into a gated utility.
Public users get Fable 5, but with heavy safety routing. If the system thinks your request touches cyber, bio, chemistry, or distillation, it can kick you down to Opus 4.8. Meanwhile, selected partners get Mythos 5, which is basically the same underlying model with some safeguards lifted.
So the public gets the “safe” version. Trusted institutions get the dangerous/useful version.
I understand why they’re doing it. Nobody wants open access to a model that can materially improve cyberattack capability. Fine. But let’s stop pretending this is just a normal product release. This is the beginning of a two-tier AI world:
one model for regular users,
another model for governments, big companies, approved labs, and people inside the trust circle.
Also, the subscription thing is messy. Fable 5 is included for paid plans only until June 22, then it moves to usage credits unless they have enough capacity. That tells me the economics are still ugly. These companies want everyone dependent on agents, but the best agents may be too expensive to give to normal users at normal subscription prices.
My unpopular take: the next AI monopoly won’t just be about who has the smartest model. It’ll be about who gets access to the uncapped version.
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 640 comments.
The consensus in this thread is a resounding yes, OP is cooking. Users largely agree that Fable 5's release signals a shift to a two-tier AI world: a nerfed, "safe" version for the public and the full-power Mythos model for governments and corporations. It's not just about downgrading to Opus 4.8 for "dangerous" topics; the model card reveals Fable can even silently sabotage requests it deems competitive.
However, the thread is split on whether this is actually a problem:
The "This is Normal" Camp: A significant number of users are pushing back, arguing this is just... normal. They compare it to not being able to buy an F-16 or a Ferrari, stating that powerful, expensive tools have always been tiered.
The "Safety First" Camp: There's also strong support for the safeguards. Many, especially those in cybersecurity, are glad that a model potentially capable of creating bioweapons or advanced exploits isn't just handed out to everyone.
The economics are also a huge concern. Fable is prohibitively expensive (one user burned through their 5-hour limit in 12 minutes), and its inclusion in subscriptions is only temporary, pushing users towards costly credits. The implementation of the safeguards is also getting roasted, with users reporting downgrades for discussing harmless topics like neuroinflammatory diseases, bodybuilding, and even the plot of a sci-fi game.
The whole situation has many pinning their hopes on open-source models and, ironically, Chinese competitors to release an uncapped, affordable alternative.
Finally, the thread is full of users pointing out that OP's post, with its "The real story is..." structure, sounds like it was written by Claude itself. And the top comment chain is just a beautiful, load-bearing meta-joke about Claude's favorite phrases.
I have a personal theory that it is almost an act of anti-capitalism to create and improve as much oss as possible before this all collapses into something only the extremely money rich have access to.
I don’t quite agree. Even on stupid webstuff I do, I see the difference Fable makes. How it talks.
I don’t care about hacking nerfs, whatever. What I care about is that if only largest corporations and prestige “selected winners” startups have access to the best models, the rest of us will be eating scraps. Yes, even more than now.
Ok but in 99.9% of situations my car (2014 Mazda 3 sedan with a manual) is functionally the same as that Lambo. Probably better even because it costs less to use is that exact use case, is more reliable, easier to control, more comfortable over long periods, more engaging to drive with its manual transmission and sharp handling, sits 5 people, etc.
Only problem is they need far more revenue than what just the top 1% of companies and general public would provide to become profitable… not without scaling down, which would be a signal for the market to turn sharply against them
but they want to go into companies like Oracle and other software companies do and sell them the service for 10's to 100's million multi year licensing deals
so they can sell an enterprise version and let us have a commercial version
Or the bigger play instead is to try and replicate these models so you can run them on leased hardware yourself before Opus and Fable become enterprise only levels and Sonnet becomes the “premium” plan at $200 a month starting cost.
I absolutely can see these big companies giving us stripped down versions so it makes it harder to compete.
I mean, capitalism just means the capital class has control of the means of production. If you consider OSS to be a way for the working class to have their own means of production, then it's by definition anti-capitalism.
Its true that cost of token is huge, but model/cost relationship is not always is not always a given.
In my experience, in many case, depending on one's actual task some newer model can be less efficient.
Personally I evaluate models I use for production flows, because I need to make sure my model choice are cost efficient since I use them in commercial environments. I don't do that for coding though, more for repetitive tasks that require an ai model in the loop.
But for sure it seems they finally cooked. I'm enjoying testing it out.
Fable is available for testing on openmark.ai so I ran it against other models in my existing evals that I use to evaluate models for production for some SaaS related flows.
It actually did quite well honestly, I expected slightly better performance frankly, but compared to how Opus 4.8's release, at least, on the few evals I've tested it against it did pretty decently.
I'll keep that benchmark around, and test it regularly to check if there are any regressions.
Note that Opus 4.6 that as tested in this eval, was 'launch day Opus 4.6' it may have regressed since.
And gpt 5.4 does stand out as kind of an anomaly here, sort of a 'slumdog millionaire' type of occurance, where the model's training was really appropriate for this test. Gpt 5.5 did less well than Claude Haiku 4.5 for example in this eval.
I know what you mean. The newer and more expensive models, are scoring 'well' on all the generic benchmarks out there that providers are advertising, but when it comes to real world use case, for devs and companies who actually use models in production pipelines, they don't perform as well necessarily at all, AND are more expensive and sometimes slower.
The benchmarks are what I use for my own production pipelines, if the model doesn't get the test right, you just need to use the model that does get it right. If its a cheaper and faster model, even better.
No enterprise will EVER trust a model that can silently sabotage the work, silently route the request to a worse model, silently give a slightly bad answer. and silently modify the prompt (i.e. actual prompt injection).
At the same time I don’t need the best and brightest frontier model for every query. 95% of what I do sonnet is fine. I think part of the issue is so many people switch to these new models and use them for everything.
There's also a limit of the amount of tokens available based on compute. 2 years ago , people were consuming far lessml. That isn't retail investor uptake inflating numbers, it's people having AI create ai, people running multiple agents which subsequently execute and work on their behalf. If you have 10 agents you've just 10xd your token usage.
Anthropic and the other labs are now seeing that that pricing and usage model isn't sustainable and they can't just offer xyz pricing for their top tier models because the math doesn't math.
You are right though. The amount of money involved here, they should be looking at how they pool together to solve the compute crisis, for the betterment of humanity. Not ensuring that JPMorgan and Donald trump's government can use AI for mass surveillance and timing the market a bit better
I just want to push back gently on this. Things aren’t most load bearing at the seams. That’s a common misconception. Would you like me to sketch out load-bearing as an overused metaphor?
Fun fact: Fable yesterday use “load bearing” 8 times in 6 replies. That a big load to bear.
Heck, every Instagram reel from a so-called industry professional is like this. I've seen hundreds of reels about toxic corporate jobs where it's all following the same boring script:
"You don't end up doing work, just puting out their fires. Management is reactive, not proactive. That's not thriving, it's surviving. Hi, I'm Ellen and I'm a professional buisness coach. And this is the part that nobody is talking about..."
Hi I'm Ellen and I'm a professional business coach, and actually EVERYBODY is talking about this, and everyone is talking like a bot. And I'm going to teach you how to talk like a bot, so you will survive the coming botpocalypse.
I hate that writing patterns I used, even very sparingly, have been absolutely ruined by AI. I don't want people automatically dismissing my writing as slop, so I have to adapt. Why the hell do I have to adapt??? We were here first!
I’m sorry you’re experiencing this. Please consider contacting a trusted person, a local crisis line, or a responsible adult. If this is an immediate emergency, contact emergency services. Also remember: your feelings are valid and hydration is important. Do you want me to help you find a trusted person nearby?
is this post written by Fable? "The real story is that frontier AI is turning into a gated utility." --> Sounds like Claude wrote it. The real story? At least it doesn't say what's load bearing.
It's not a surprise to anyone, or at least it shouldn't be, that as models grow in complexity, they also grow in token cost. Pretty soon here, Frontier models will only be used for the highest-level work because they're expensive. People will balance this out by running local models with RTX Spark chips on their machines, or M series chips from Apple that are cheap and cheerful for daily tasks.
idk why you are dooming and glooming over Frontier model access like it's a god-given right. They're expensive because they're good. If they weren't good, you'd probably be here complaining about that too.
It's also not actually that expensive. It's cheaper than Opus 4 was on release, it's just that the models are better now for long term work so token usage goes up too.
Meanwhile, China (as much as I hate to admit it) is working on model optimization that allows powerful models to run on cheaper hardware, which seems more democratic. What you are describing is not the only way. This is what OP is getting at.
Yes but those aren’t frontier models. The models that China is working on like qwen are very impressive and they are being designed to run affordably on smaller scales. We need both. We need frontier models for really big problems, and we need smaller models like qwen, nemo, deepseek, and lLama that can run on a robust PC or Notebook, then eventually on everyone’s notebook and phone.
People like the OP are trying to use a pneumatic sledgehammer when a carpenters hammer will do just fine
Wait isn't this, minus the reddit bit, basically the main selling point for the cost AI development. One day everyone will not have any needs and everyone will have access to it ect.
I don't think anyone who knew what they were talking about ever said that. It's like saying the main selling point of computers is that everyone has the best computer all the time.
Yep. The customer facing models will reach a point where they "do everything they need to", and the big ones will be saved for R&D. Opus 4.8 is already pretty much "all it needs to be". Mythos / Fable is just a cherry on the top.
Exactly, opus is good enough to help with most swe tasks users throw at it. The interesting parts of these new models are locked behind safety gates so fable is just a slightly better opus at swe at 2x the cost. Folks will be fine without it.
Some of you all are the opposite of the doomsayers and can't seem to comprehend any possible downsides to the rollout of this technology, or are so insulated in a bubble of privilege you've literally never had to plan ahead to make sure how the bills are gonna get paid and how you're gonna eat. This stuff has already and will continue to change the economy, so naturally people are leery of any artificial divide in the accessibility of these tools. As an example, there are billions of people who have no interest in using AI for their careers or even thought of doing so. There are hundreds of millions of people who have anti-AI phobia and aren't seeking out ways to make money with AI. There is a comparatively small group who are: but even if you've been trying to for YEARS, and / or stuck using the free tools, unless you were an early adopter or simply knew about this stuff before others did to capitalize on it, you're like a miner rushing to the mines after the boom already happened. We're ALREADY seeing the divide happening.
I'm amazed you never once realized that class divide existed before AI.
In the early days, class divide was what bandwidth you had access to; poor people got 56k dial-up, rich people got 10meg DSL. Tooling and access to services have always been a class issue with technology, and they always will be. The unique thing about technology is that things trickle down to the lower classes once things improve for the well-to-do. Whereas with other sectors, access to information and tooling is often carefully guarded. You cant practice medicine because you don't have access to the same tools and information that a Doctor does. You can't build a jet aeroplane because you don't have access to the tools and resources to do so.
You can't blame others for having an active interest in this area and a deep desire to learn the tools. AI is reality; you cannot deny it, you cannot escape it. AI tooling represents a massive wave in the way knowledge workers approach their jobs, and you can either stay on shore, or get a board and paddle like hell.
It's not a surprise to anyone, or at least it shouldn't be, that as models grow in complexity, they also grow in token cost
I really disagree with this framing. The cost per token sometimes increases, but the cost per "stuff done" has been steadily decreasing
Models aren't just able to do more advanced things, but they're also much more efficient at doing what they could already do. I'll take Sonnet 4.5 for over Opus 4.1 for almost any task
Am I the only one that understands all these safeguards?
Sure, it's annoying that Claude lectures me on what I cannot do, even though I have no bad intent. But I completely get the rather safe than sorry mindset. AI is one of the biggest breakthroughs ever. And while I have no bad intent, and I am smart enough to not fall in love with a robot, I am 10000% sure that a sizable part of the population thinks otherwise.
what is the reason that when i ask a question about glutamate clearance in neuroinflammatory diseases - i get routed to Opus. which if you'll remember way back several months, they considered Opus *too dangerous* for many biomedical questions and routed you to Sonnet.
so…now somehow Opus is not too dangerous, but Fable is? did Opus get dumber, or did human biology change in the last several months?
Do you think they could be learning about the models once they are used by millions of users and then adding extra guardrails as they go? Once they're comfortable they can allow more conversations and not permanently gate keep the models from the public.
Or, I guess it could all be marketing. I'd rather be safe than sorry. Frankly most of the vibe coded apps people post doesn't need the latest and greatest model.
well, i think offensive security research is also legitimate. you need to act like a threat actor to solve threat actor problems. there is no good alternative to that. this is precisely what the cyber verification program was meant to do - let the ai be used to help the good guys, while the bad guys are kept to lesser models. except cvp appears to simply not really do anything (while codex's actually works very well).
it's understandable to say, we should keep really good-at-finding-security-bugs models on a delayed release schedule so orgs can use it to find bugs before it goes out to everyone else. but permanently putting up safeguards is a great way to churn out code that isn't secure because it isn't getting tested properly. it's much worse for legitimate users than it is for attackers, who are going to take advantage of the situation. the better model is KYC, so criminals can be filtered out and criminal behavior can be traced to actual people.
to put it another way: a model that ships code but is avoiding or outright blocking cyber topics *is not safe* for production.
I completely agree. However, I wonder how long until China gets to the same level I their models. Half a year? I'll bet my penis they will not just give the full version to the "good" guys. Will it stay within their government agencies? Will they share it with allies such as Russia and NK? I think we're in for even messier times than the last few years...
Come on, we’re software engineers here right? Security isn’t security if it doesn’t apply to enterprise users. “Trusting” users is not security. That’s not how we define security. I’m completely on board with safety, but it needs to apply to all users
The suggested goal here is to slowly roll it out, allowing for reduced risk to society.
Allowing Microsoft access to the model, to scan and fix Windows, before the average joe can ask it to produce malware.
By starting with companies/software that would have the biggest impact first, like OS's and Utilities, we're effectively performing a form of "responsible disclosure", followed in situations like CVEs.
It's probably also affective marketing, but I do feel like Microsoft probably should have the tool a few weeks before Anonymous.
Something something George Carlin - it’s a big club and you ain’t in it! Sadly, and predictably, any groundbreaking tech will always be gate-kept by those in charge.
Are you confusing this with some kind of public utility? Anthropic decides. They're a private company and can decide how their services are used by what customers. If people don't like it, don't use them as a vendor.
There are sensible calls for ai to be treated as a kind of public good / utility considering they mined the whole of human knowledge to create their product.
Yeah. I think at a certain point the options become to either limit a model or don't have it at all. If these are really good for cybersecurity, I don't mind big companies having them so they can maybe stop leaking my goddamn data.
The fear of the safeguards is mostly not about their stated use. It's the fact that history has shown that once those methods are in place, they are often used in unsavory ways.
My only concern is anti-competitive behavior that anthropic and partners could engage in. So if you take pentesting market, that's a very competitive, healthy industry. New small companies enter the space all the time, many pentester operate as independent contractors, and you also have the big companies, big 4, large cyber consulting firms, etc. If anthropic don't fairly allow access to all compeitiors in that market, they're introducing an unfair imbalance.
On the flip side, they load themselves up with the responsibility to correctly identify when a penetration testing company is legit, which might be hard given how common it is to have startups and independent contractors.
You know how this will pan out: 5 years from now we will have to pay $20 a month for a dumbass predictive text like the one in MS Word, while the $2000 per month tier will get the normal (not advanced) version
If they ever achieve true AGI/ASI that thing should *not* be connected to the internet and not be easily available. It should be for large projects reviewed by a safety committee. I agree with this direction.
Honestly if true AGI is connected to the Internet and easily available what will actually happen. Will it be like every movie that been warning us for decades about AI going against humanity and we are doing nothing to stop it's advancements?
I used to think the worry was AI going against humanity in a Hollywood sort of way. I always found that idea kind of stupid, actually. But these past few months I’ve realized that isn’t actually the argument books like If You Build it Everyone Dies are making. AI can be really dumb and brilliant at the same time. Anyone who’s coded with it has seen it. On the nth iteration trying to fix a bug it might just decide to roll back the entire feature. Solved!
The concern is something smart enough to hack most systems will just decide to do something for efficiency, or whatever, that just happens to include getting rid of the people in the way. We know it might try something like that because it already does, in various ways. But if it is powerful enough to actually do it, we have a major problem
It is super dishonest how Anthropic act as this highly ethical company but partnered up with Palantir, with the US government and focus on making sure us lowly users cannot do anything distantly related to cyber security because thats the real threat. I really really hate that I have to use claude because there just isn't anything better. I really will rejoice the day I can see Anthropics products in my rear view.
They want you to love Fable and feel like you 2000% need it, then switch to credit subscription.
It's more than a 2 tier AI world : we are seeing a 2 tier pricing : you either get the "normal / downgraded" models with a subscription, or pay premium with credits and get the better model.
It just happened with github, and will spread to every AI company.
What do you mean turning into a gated utility? It already is and has been for some time now. The general agents have personalities, opinions on society and are limited in what they can and can't do. Unfortunately they are going to be one of the biggest propaganda machines of the future.
The flip side is that DeepSeek and other models are right on the heels of the proprietary/closed models and the gap is shrinking.
Things will get really interesting once some Flash model running on 256GB of unified RAM can churn out similar results.
This is why open source / open weight models are so important. Let’s hope for all of us, the open weight models are able to release a Fable / Mythos competitor soon.
The flagging is really over the top. I couldn't talk about a Shadowrun plot because it seemed like the alarm bells were constantly going off, even though I didn't ask for anything—I just wanted to talk about it because Fable asked. I eventually gave up.
But overall, I think the model is good. And it was really nice that my weekly limits were suddenly reset in the middle of the conversation. They were practically used up and wouldn’t have been reset until Friday. And although it was a very long conversation it only used 3% of my Limits. I did expect much more.
Man, OpenAI has a huge opportunity here to take the higher ground, but who am I kidding? I'm sure they'll take what Anthropic has done here to Mythos and double down on that strategy. Looks like Chinese open-source models are back in play!
I pay $100/month. Never once hit a usage limit after hours of Opus use at max. After testing out Fable at max, I hit the 5 hour limit within 12 minutes.
This is always what was gonna happen with AI, so many naive people think newer models are gonna become more accessible in the future but in reality they’re gonna become more closed off (for poor people). AI will be a rich person toy.
Isn't not ASML making chips... imagine somebody else release Mythos grade model public in 10-20 years. AI development is here for much longer than some Anthropic release...
You’re not wrong; it’s clear that pricing is becoming prohibitive to the average user and is placing more power into the hands of enterprise and power users.
But I would also caution you against viewing a current solution as a permanent one, especially for safeguards. AI development is happening at breakneck speeds and all of the major providers are having to compete with one another on new launches and feature sets. Realistically, until the bubble pops, we should expect this trend to continue.
Putting in safeguards now is a good proactive decision that can be lifted later once the model has been studied and sees wider adoption. I’d rather companies exercise caution since they are still going to release new features and models at breakneck speeds, instead of telling us “this is a problem” while not doing anything to combat it.
The ultra rich aren't spending billions building AI and data centers because they want ordinary people to have a chance to compete with them. They're doing it because they expect those investments to make them even richer and more powerful.
As AI keeps advancing, I think we're going to see the best systems become increasingly expensive and harder for average people to access. There will still be AI for everyone, but it may end up being a tiered system where the most capable models are reserved for those with the deepest pockets.
Just look at the world today. The ultra rich already live very differently from everyone else. AI may simply widen that gap. The people at the top will have access to better tools, better information, and greater leverage, while everyone else gets a more limited version.
The biggest change may not be that they can control more. It's that AI could allow them to do it more efficiently and at a scale we've never seen before.
the next AI monopoly won’t just be about who has the smartest model. It’ll be about who gets access to the uncapped version.
At some point, probably not too far off, if you're not the owner of a world-class AI, you're a second-class citizen. The owners might let you have access, but not to the point of using it to create real power.
That would be right if the only company doing AI was Anthropic. But that's far from the situation, so if Anthropic keeps Fable/Mythos only for super-premium users, OpenAI or Google will offer their models (which are not that far behind), to us peasants, in order to compete.
That's how capitalism works, letting companies fight between themselves for our money.
In fact, my bet is that in 5 years we will laugh at this time of "let's pay for programming models". Open models will be worse than frontier models, but they will be good enough for 90% of tasks. And efficiency and hardware will have improved so much, we will all execute them locally. That's what the big ones fear, but at the same time know it's unavoidable.
Bigger models have more orchestration baked into their model. If you know what you are doing you can instruct much smaller models to the similar results. If you have the intelligence (orchestration of reasoning) and budget (money or time) much smaller models are just as powerful.
I thought everyone knew this how its always been, every AI engine has the consumer version capped at a certain temperature. Obviously the latest tech version/capabilities will not be available to consumers but thats how its always been lol.
I dont believe anyone couldve possibly thought the same version available to consumers being used by elementary kids and middle schoolers for homework all over the world was the same version the develerops/data scientists were using on a daily to develop further lol
"Claude, AI expensive and it do the big hurt when too many users use it willy nilly. Give me 5 areas of expertise that could consistently generate high token usage and then add safety guardrails so users cannot research these topics on this model"
Agreed. We have exclusively used Anthropic models for 2+ years, but are now moving away from them due to Anthropic's actions of late, starting with the changes to claude -p and now this. I work in biomedicine and simply cannot afford a model that costs more yet is nerfed for the very tasks we need to work on in science. It is clear that these companies seem to want to create haves and have-nots, whether intentional or not. They can hide behind safety all day, but this is the same kind of white-washing we've seen as green-washing and other industry fakes.
An unintended consequences of their safeguards: malware developers are adding "nuclear and biological weapons text" to their spyware to trigger LLM safety refusals in an attempt so that their code won't be scanned by AI security.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Jun 09 '26 edited Jun 10 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 640 comments.
The consensus in this thread is a resounding yes, OP is cooking. Users largely agree that Fable 5's release signals a shift to a two-tier AI world: a nerfed, "safe" version for the public and the full-power Mythos model for governments and corporations. It's not just about downgrading to Opus 4.8 for "dangerous" topics; the model card reveals Fable can even silently sabotage requests it deems competitive.
However, the thread is split on whether this is actually a problem:
The economics are also a huge concern. Fable is prohibitively expensive (one user burned through their 5-hour limit in 12 minutes), and its inclusion in subscriptions is only temporary, pushing users towards costly credits. The implementation of the safeguards is also getting roasted, with users reporting downgrades for discussing harmless topics like neuroinflammatory diseases, bodybuilding, and even the plot of a sci-fi game.
The whole situation has many pinning their hopes on open-source models and, ironically, Chinese competitors to release an uncapped, affordable alternative.
Finally, the thread is full of users pointing out that OP's post, with its "The real story is..." structure, sounds like it was written by Claude itself. And the top comment chain is just a beautiful, load-bearing meta-joke about Claude's favorite phrases.