Comment by NoboruWataya
5 days ago
I am only a casual Clause (Pro) user and I am confused by the messaging, maybe I'm missing something obvious.
> Until July 7, you can use up to 50% of your plan's weekly usage limit on Fable 5.
Does this mean that being able to use Fable on my subscription is a time-limited promotion? I have a subscription, why can't I just... use the model? Is it the case that going forward a subscription will only give you access to older models and newer ones will require additional payment?
Yes:
> 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. Learn more about using usage credits.
I'm not sure what this means in the long run. Either Fable 5 might become part of the subscription again once stronger models become available or Anthropic's compute capacity increases, or this is the start of the subscription being phased out. It doesn't really make sense to pay for a subscription that's stuck on Opus 4.8 when other providers are continually pushing out better models.
If it's the end of the subsidized subscriptions, that's going to cause problems for a lot of not so heavily capitalized companies that want to make use of frontier AI models.
It also would mean I stop being an Anthropic customer outside of whatever my employer is willing to pay. I prefer it for now to GPT/Codex but if GPT5.6 is as good as or close to Fable, and its included in the subscription, I'll switch the moment its available.
There will be an Opus 5 though.
If Opus 5 is capable enough, it will have the same guardrails with blocks/downgrades as Fable.
So now we are supposed to cheer for Opus 5 to be just a mild improvement at best?
If Fable becomes "API priced", I'm going to switch from Claude Code to some other harness.
My loop will switch from "100% Anthropic subscription" to "10% occasional Anthropic API credits + 90% Chinese models".
This is the moment American models sink or swim. If they switch to API pricing, I'm adding Chinese models into the mix.
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I still don't understand the difference between the fable models and opus I mean why fable wasn't opus 5 and instead is a new name?
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That's fair.
That didn't take long...
Managed to hit 100% of my 5 hour limit and 19% of my weekly Fable limit in 12 minutes. I have a Max 5x subscription.
Can't wait to try out GPT 5.6 at some point when it comes available.
They just reset the weekly limits (Max 20x)
Wow, practically totally useless.
This doesn't have a Max 20X upgrade path for me https://claude.ai/upgrade, but this does https://claude.ai/upgrade/max/from-existing
During the initial release, they indicated you'd be able to use Fable 5 as part of your subscription for a limited period of time, and then it would require usage credits. They also did say at that time that they hoped to make it a part of the subscription plans again at some point after that.
For this return, they've extended the usage period to July 7, but limited you to 50% of your usage quota, and have not restated the desire to make it permanently part of the subscription plans at some point.
I still have hope, but it's not moving in the right direction to be sure.
Personal prediction: I do think the market will essentially force their hand to include it in subscriptions before too long. OpenAI, local models, Chinese models will continue to improve.
But, there are also harsh realities of compute volume and cost to run all of these will be fighting against.
What I do expect is a multi-tiered rollout of future models. You want the latest SOTA release? Usage credits.
Subscription plans will end up getting models on a lagging interval of a few months.
I do think compute is the limiter here. It's a huge model.
> 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.
They stated the desire not to bring it to the subscription.
Right, just as they did in the original announcement. It would become pay only. They then mentioned that it may return to the subscription in the future, which is kind of obvious: Once the SOTA had advanced further and this is just the last gen model, it'll likely be dumped in the sub.
No you will still get access to newer models on the subscription. You should have access to Sonnet 5, which is new. It's just Mythos class models that are API only.
For now... You never know with these companies.
Yes, it's the classic "first hit's free" marketing plan: offer Fable "free" to subscription users for a while, and then pull the plug, hoping they'll be hooked and want to spend even more money to use it.
This is why I'm not using Fable at all unless they decide to make it permanently a part of the subscription plans. I don't want to be tempted to burn more cash than I already am.
Fable is more expensive to run, and they haven't figured out the GTM strategy just yet. I imagine they'll see how much people actually use to see if it's still worth subsidizing on the Max/Pro plans, or if they make an extra tier above.