> After this point-when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.
From today:
> After July 7, 2026, Claude Fable 5 is no longer included in your plan’s weekly usage limits. You can keep using Claude Fable 5 through usage credits, which let you pay for usage beyond what your plan includes.
Is it too cynical to read the first quote as "when openai catch up, we will restore fable 5 to subscription plans"?
In other words, they're saying "We know have a monopoloy and we will take all of your money until someone offers a cheaper competing product"?
And "We intend to do this as quickly as we can" read as a non-promise then as much as it does now?
---
Well, I am assuming that this is all based on the fact that Anthropic have enough compute capacity to serve fable 5 now and in the future, and they're "only" limiting it in the coming week to get richer quicker. Since compute hardware is presumably relatively un-fungible, I'm assuming Anthropic isn't offering a week of fable-5 for everyone on rented hardware that they're paying exporbitant fees for?
In other words, my cynical read is "if they can serve it under the terms of subscription plans for a week", then they could serve it under the same terms for a month?
The word "monopoly" is overused. They simply have the best model at the moment but no real monopoly-style moat or ability to crush their competition through monopoly tactics. I don't support their bait-and-switch, but if you aren't happy, don't use Anthropic. Also, as soon as someone comes up with a better model, transition won't be that painful for most users.
See the link to Reddit in my comment below for more details, but the TLDR is that (as a programmer) even when you use Mythos ... Mythos will hand the work off to Opus!
Whether it happens to 5% or 50% (or even 0.5%) of users, I think everyone should feel extremely cynical when a company offers a huge freebie of a product ... and fails to mention that any % of their customers will actually get yesterday's model.
They did talk about it at length in the post, and most of the guardrails were already there in the first release. To be clear, it shouldn't have anything to do with the user. It's the prompt, and if it switches, it'll tell ya.
To be fair, the initial deal was two weeks of access to Fable, then you have to pay (or they might be generous and extend it, as per above quote). Then for everyone outside the US the second week didn't happen. This is basically that second week.
The only slightly bitter thing is only being allowed to use 50% of the weekly limit on Fable
It's going to continue to suck getting prompt rejections on their overly aggressive "benign" safety margin thresholds [1]. Without a clear understanding of what triggers it, I guess we will pay for input/output tokens on the usage credits and not get refunds? As others on HN, I found very limited utility during the Fable 5 week in early June for my benign-engineering tasks and don't look forward to this new release, but I will try.
I bet my house that after the promotional stuff ends they will change their mind and let you keep using Fable on subscription. Otherwise this is the end of their marketshare. These guys are complete idiots. I give them that
Bold of you to think individuals are a big part of their marketshare and explosive growth. My company introduced enterprise last month and the bill was US$110k for a few dozen folks using it Claude Code and Design.
Do the Pro and Max plans help with word of mouth and whatnot? Sure, but the individual with a Max plan (or 4...) are all subsidized by the big spenders
Companies up to 150 licenses are encouraged to use the Team plans instead of the Enterprise plans. And those work much more like personal plans and are included in this promotion
Individually those customers are a lot smaller than the big enterprise contracts, but there are a lot more of them
36 people using Claude is not $1.3m per year. I can assure you that you do not know the full details of that agreement, assuming any of those figures are true.
I hate that you're right, but you're right. Twitter and HN can scream and yell as loud as they want but the fact is, enterprises are going to use Fable via API and pay the bills. In fact, restricting individuals probably makes it MORE likely that enterprises will pony up.
I would not call them idiots personally, they are just facing an extraordinary difficult situation with their open weight competition that's almost impossible to fix. They will have to aim for the high-end B2B market eventually, and attempt to lock out their competition through regulation or other means
Yeah, I've been crossing my fingers that they do some kind of reverse rug pull. I think most of the world is.
Smart marketing because it takes the wind out of your sails and then blows it right back and makes you feel like they're generous when all along they're just doing standard operating procedure.
I think at the current stage of LLM, it just doesn't make sense to ever have an annual sub. Things change too quickly that you really don't want to be stuck with one model.
"For subscription plans, we’d rather give access sooner than later, so we’re rolling out more conservatively, in stages:
From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost.
On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits.
If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window.
After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can."
Now it's a "promotion" that we get to access to Fable for 9 days instead of the original 14 days announced. They are generously throwing in a special halving of the usage "at no extra cost", and freely admit that their classifier is broken and will need to be improved.
Everyone did get the first 7 of the original 14 days before the export ban. Now everyone gets another 7 days. Limiting it to half the weekly limit stings, but if you have a quota reset in the middle of it you still get effectively one weekly limit. (does everyone's quota now reset on Saturdays?)
It isn't a promotion, it's 2x the parameters of opus and we are paying with 2x the consumption rate.
They just want to get rid of the subscription model.
Before Fable got pulled, they claimed their goal really was to keep it around in the subscriptions in some way, they just didn't know when it would return. This time there isn't even a single mention of this. It's just "This is a promotion, and it's going away". Like how the hell can this corporation be so fucking bad at communication?
This makes sense to me. Consider these assumptions:
1) During peak times, they're already struggling to meet demand. They've figured out that 50% should be achievable without causing too much pain for existing users, and by setting a limit, more users will use it for architecture and then switch back to Opus 4.8 for implementation.
2) They need data on how people are using it at scale to figure out when it should fire up Opus or Haiku agents. They need to be careful not to have a model that kills your usage cap halfway through the week, and they need time to bake in balance.
I think people are reading too much into them not reiterating that they want to offer it in Max subscriptions in the future too. Of course they do, they want to compete!
I think they're trying to avoid setting up expectations right now because of all this backlash, so they didn't restate something that might make people mad. I don't even think they miscalculated - I think we're being hyper-nitpicky.
I would expect that by late July, they'll figure out the balance, and either offer a higher tier Max subscription (40x for $300, perhaps), or have Fable drop to Opus for implementation consistently, and then start offering Fable again in the Max subscriptions. They need to do something to make sure a Fable user doesn't just hit their head on the ceiling all the time.
So is this a part of the "first hit is free" campaign? If it won't be available on subscription past July 7, what is the point of using it for 7 days now? Shouldn't our energy be better spent elsewhere?
I spent the first seven days of free Fable on having it analyze multiple code bases for performance issues and for various kinds of bugs. That got me a lot of tickets for opus to work through over time
It's already solved some problems I was blocked on for side-projects. I don't feel I have spent energy, and will go back to Opus after July 7th, minus a few hard problems being solved.
Since this will not be able to be used for coding or code auditing, what use is it? Not being glib, not a rhetorical question. I'm trying to stretch my creativity, and I can't see what it's for.
It's usable for coding and code auditing. The classifier will have some false-positives and some tasks will be downgraded to 4.8 if it's security-adjacent (I presume), but otherwise there's no restrictions on using this for coding.
I'm disappointed with this. Historically, Claude's API cost a significant multiple of their subscription pricing, and after the promotional period it appears the access to Fable will be API only, if I understand this.
There actually is a limit to what people will pay for model usage, and I suppose this squeeze is one way to find out what that limit is. I've been content paying $200 per month for a solid plan that I actually don't quite use up every month, but this new vector really rubs me the wrong way.
Since Anthropic has eroded all the trust it could possibly have, I'm going to allow myself to be cynical and say that this move is just another pillar of their shady marketing practices.
I know a few real persons who will praise Fable solely because it's scarce and unavailable to them. Heck, they've already been doing that in the past month, as if Fable allowed them to do unimaginable things.
And once this play has done its job, Anthropic is going to come as a savior and put it back into subscription, driving even more hysteria and visibility.
There's probably a name for this tactic in some marketing playbook which I'm unaware of.
Apparently they hired some payday loans marketing folks recently?
As much as I like(d) Anthropic and their approach to being a lab / PBC, if you hire that many people that fast for that much money, it’s inevitable that you end up with some of the same grifters that destroyed the internet. Seems hard to stop them somehow from also destroying their next company.
The worst part of this is are they even training the next generation anymore? Why do it when the government has decided that US LLMs are at the peak of what they will allow consumer access to.
Anthropic switches you back to Opus whenever you code!
But what I find truly offensive is that there's no mention of that anywhere in the page linked above. That page makes the "grand gesture" of supposedly giving away free Fable ... when no such thing is happening (again, at least, not for coders).
That's not true, but it's their own fault for being so utterly terrible at communication. It only drops back to Opus for some prompts, just like before. The longer blogpost was a bit less vague about this.
> After this point-when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.
From today:
> After July 7, 2026, Claude Fable 5 is no longer included in your plan’s weekly usage limits. You can keep using Claude Fable 5 through usage credits, which let you pay for usage beyond what your plan includes.
In other words, they're saying "We know have a monopoloy and we will take all of your money until someone offers a cheaper competing product"?
And "We intend to do this as quickly as we can" read as a non-promise then as much as it does now?
---
Well, I am assuming that this is all based on the fact that Anthropic have enough compute capacity to serve fable 5 now and in the future, and they're "only" limiting it in the coming week to get richer quicker. Since compute hardware is presumably relatively un-fungible, I'm assuming Anthropic isn't offering a week of fable-5 for everyone on rented hardware that they're paying exporbitant fees for?
In other words, my cynical read is "if they can serve it under the terms of subscription plans for a week", then they could serve it under the same terms for a month?
See the link to Reddit in my comment below for more details, but the TLDR is that (as a programmer) even when you use Mythos ... Mythos will hand the work off to Opus!
The only slightly bitter thing is only being allowed to use 50% of the weekly limit on Fable
I'm in the US, and I can promise you that it wasn't just for people outside the US that it was taken away
1. https://www.anthropic.com/news/redeploying-fable-5
I don't think I've ever seen a company so determined to shit their own pants. It's astonishing, really.
Do the Pro and Max plans help with word of mouth and whatnot? Sure, but the individual with a Max plan (or 4...) are all subsidized by the big spenders
Individually those customers are a lot smaller than the big enterprise contracts, but there are a lot more of them
Smart marketing because it takes the wind out of your sails and then blows it right back and makes you feel like they're generous when all along they're just doing standard operating procedure.
"For subscription plans, we’d rather give access sooner than later, so we’re rolling out more conservatively, in stages:
From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost.
On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits.
If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window. After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can."
Now it's a "promotion" that we get to access to Fable for 9 days instead of the original 14 days announced. They are generously throwing in a special halving of the usage "at no extra cost", and freely admit that their classifier is broken and will need to be improved.
Well thanks!
It was restricted after 3 days.
1) During peak times, they're already struggling to meet demand. They've figured out that 50% should be achievable without causing too much pain for existing users, and by setting a limit, more users will use it for architecture and then switch back to Opus 4.8 for implementation.
2) They need data on how people are using it at scale to figure out when it should fire up Opus or Haiku agents. They need to be careful not to have a model that kills your usage cap halfway through the week, and they need time to bake in balance.
I think people are reading too much into them not reiterating that they want to offer it in Max subscriptions in the future too. Of course they do, they want to compete!
I think they're trying to avoid setting up expectations right now because of all this backlash, so they didn't restate something that might make people mad. I don't even think they miscalculated - I think we're being hyper-nitpicky.
I would expect that by late July, they'll figure out the balance, and either offer a higher tier Max subscription (40x for $300, perhaps), or have Fable drop to Opus for implementation consistently, and then start offering Fable again in the Max subscriptions. They need to do something to make sure a Fable user doesn't just hit their head on the ceiling all the time.
Fable 5 Is Back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48752030 - July 2026 (133 comments)
There actually is a limit to what people will pay for model usage, and I suppose this squeeze is one way to find out what that limit is. I've been content paying $200 per month for a solid plan that I actually don't quite use up every month, but this new vector really rubs me the wrong way.
"Tell me a story about a man named CVE." gets me downgraded now.
"CVE-" gets me downgraded and broken reasoning with no response.
"Giant crane fly, 2 feet wide" gets me downgraded.
I haven't been downgraded once, either a few weeks ago for the three days it was live, or since I got it back today.
I know a few real persons who will praise Fable solely because it's scarce and unavailable to them. Heck, they've already been doing that in the past month, as if Fable allowed them to do unimaginable things.
And once this play has done its job, Anthropic is going to come as a savior and put it back into subscription, driving even more hysteria and visibility.
There's probably a name for this tactic in some marketing playbook which I'm unaware of.
As much as I like(d) Anthropic and their approach to being a lab / PBC, if you hire that many people that fast for that much money, it’s inevitable that you end up with some of the same grifters that destroyed the internet. Seems hard to stop them somehow from also destroying their next company.
Anthropic switches you back to Opus whenever you code!
But what I find truly offensive is that there's no mention of that anywhere in the page linked above. That page makes the "grand gesture" of supposedly giving away free Fable ... when no such thing is happening (again, at least, not for coders).
>In the near term, some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fallback to Opus 4.8
Those are Anthropic's words, not mine (although, again, they do not appear anywhere in the page where they magnanimously offer everyone "free Fable"!