Fable 5 and the June 22 Footnote

A day after Claude Fable 5 went public, the verdict is roughly what Anthropic would have wanted, with a couple of asterisks it probably expected too. The benchmark sweep got the headlines: state-of-the-art on nearly everything Anthropic tested, a million-token context window, and a price that landed lower than the run-up suggested. Fable runs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, less than half what the Mythos Preview cost. For a frontier release, cheaper-than-feared is its own kind of good review.

The enterprise side was already leaning this way. The May Ramp AI Index, built from corporate-card and invoice data across more than 50,000 US companies, put Anthropic at 34.4 percent of business adoption against OpenAI's 32.3. That isn't a Fable number, it predates the launch, but it explains the confidence. Anthropic shipped into a market that had already started picking it.

Then the criticism, and most of it is sensible rather than reflexive. The sharpest complaint is about the safety routing. The trapdoor I wrote about yesterday, the classifiers that bounce flagged requests down to Opus 4.8, turns out to fire on more than the obvious bad actors. The SANS Institute's Rob T. Lee found routine incident-response and forensic work getting redirected to the weaker model, which is exactly the false-positive problem you'd predict when a cyber classifier can't tell a defender from an attacker. Anthropic calls the safeguards "intentionally conservative" and admits the false positives. That's honest, but honesty doesn't hand a security team back the capability it's paying for.

The other recurring jab is older: that Anthropic talked up Mythos as too dangerous to release, then released a tamed version anyway, and that the danger talk did some useful marketing along the way. I'm half-persuaded. The pause-button proposal from earlier this week carried the same double image, a real safety argument and a competitive position sharing one stage. You can believe the risk is genuine and still notice it sells.

The pricing is where I think the consensus has it backwards. On the subscription plans (Pro, Max, Team, Enterprise) Fable is free through June 22, and after that, usage runs on credits. The easy read is a bait-and-switch: free trial, then the meter starts. I don't think that's what the wording actually says. Anthropic frames the cutoff around capacity, not price. The announcement says that "if capacity allows" it will extend the included window, and that it aims to "restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans" once supply catches up. That is not the language of a permanent paywall. It reads like a company that underprovisioned a launch and is rationing compute until the racks catch up.

So June 22 isn't a cliff. It's a soft cap, demand outran the hardware and the cap lifts when the hardware arrives, and the credit requirement is a throttle wearing a price tag. The promise worth holding them to is the exact phrase, "a standard part of subscription plans." It's specific enough to check in July, when we'll know whether the included window actually came back or whether capacity stayed conveniently scarce.

Sources:

Introducing Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — Anthropic

Anthropic Releases Mythos-Class Fable 5 Model With Safeguards for Cyber Risks — CSO Online

Anthropic Releases 'Safe' Version of Claude Mythos AI Model to Public — The Guardian

Anthropic Launches Mythos With Six Features You Absolutely Need — Forbes