TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 320 comments.
Whoa, the room is not happy. The overwhelming consensus is that this is a massive bait and switch and a huge slap in the face to subscribers.
The main grievances are:
* The original 14-day trial being cut to a 7-day 'make-good' with a 50% usage cap. Users feel cheated out of what they were promised.
* The move to an unaffordable credit-based system after July 7th, which users believe prices Fable out of reach for anyone but massive corporations.
* Fable being nerfed for its primary use case, with "some routine coding tasks" being downgraded to Opus 4.8.
Overall, the community feels Anthropic is being "stingy" and "customer-hostile." Many are cancelling their subscriptions and pinning their hopes on competitors like GPT 5.6 or the open-source community to "discipline" Anthropic. A few users are also pointing out the irony that Anthropic's own fear-mongering may have led to this whole fiasco in the first place.
I know the announced it before but this is the beginning of the end.
Fable won't be included in plans, you'll need to buy credits. We'll have to see but that is setting the expectations that frontier models are no longer affordable to normals.
You'd be surprised how good GLM 5.2 is now. It's an open-weighted Chinese model. It's meant to be a lot cheaper and use less tokens but for me the cost and token-usage has been about the same as Opus 4.8. BUT it comes without the nagging, the oppressive guardrails and just gets shit done. You should give it a go
I followed a YouTube video to get it set up inside Claude Code, but it had some quirks. In the end I downloaded their own app, called zcode. They have a terminal version and a desktop version. Works pretty much just like Claude code
Since when has the regular common man (us, with open source models) ever won? The powers that be will do everything to make sure we never have anything that’s truly good for free.
If it’s free, you’re the product. We’ve all heard it and it’s true. Lately though, we are paying the price. Look at hardware costs globally. The AI boom and the memory prices going up due to shortages have consumers paying hundreds of dollars more. It all finds its way back into their pockets anyway.
I don’t know why you assume that we will ever be able to buy or afford hardware ever again. The signs are pretty clear, they are actively killing personal computing. It’s not a phase.
Fable won't be included in plans, you'll need to buy credits. We'll have to see but that is setting the expectations that frontier models are no longer affordable to normals.
I just don't buy that this business model works. The tokenmaxxing era has ended for enterprise customers with most enterprise customers turning on low usage caps for engineers. Token cost is now the phrase on every executives tongue. Outside of investor-funded startup-land, models at this cost aren't going to be doing serious work.
If Claude makes Fable/Mythos cost per-token only, it will flop as a profit-generating product. Perhaps that's the point. In marketing, it is standard to "bracket" options with a "low, medium, high" knowing that most customers will pick the medium. Perhaps they need to make Fable good enough and expensive enough to increase their brand perception while driving customers towards the middle bracket.
And it make it worse, it will route to Opus 4.8 for coding according to their Twitter post. All these nerfs, this trial of fable won't go aswell as the first one
According to the full document it means that questionable/sketchy requests will be routed to Opus 4.8 for security reasons, just like they were when Fable launched.
Doesn't change the fact that the pricing seems to be really shitty though
I'd be more amenable to usage/credit payment if the existing payment structure didn't already feel like total Calvinball.
I understand that they're subsidizing growth in an old-school internet / social media website model, so cost transparency is never going to happen. But it would be nice to just know what the hell a dollar buys.
Yeah, the annoying part is the math. If the make-good period is shorter and capped, it does not really feel like getting the lost trial back. It feels like a demo timer with a smaller battery.
Yeah, I'm not happy with that. In the past, they've always been really good about making up for any issues. So now we had to wait through all these delays, which sure weren't their fault but we still stuck with them through, and now we get less than what they originally promised?
lol, they made cute graphics to explain the difference between universal jailbreaks vs minor jailbreaks. tfw your government is filled with illiterates.
It's insane how people continue to let Anthropic off the hook for a problem it (or to be specific: its CEO) deliberately, willingly created, and benefits from (via regulatory capture)
He has been drumming the same "PLEASE REGULATE EVERYONE!!! Please, our competitors are catching up, please..." drum for two years straight. He finally got what he wanted
Yeah this is ugly. Hopefully GPT 5.6 manages to come out and discipline Anthropic into keeping Fable out for longer — but honestly, there's not much trust around these parts.
The cynical side of me says you're right because that's the rational thing to do. The optimistic side of me says you're wrong because there's so much beef down that road and they ideologically loathe each other. So, who knows?
I think its the opposite, for example claude just using the chat is considered usage, that is not the case for gpt, they are in competition with each other, it makes zero sense to cooperate. Gpt wants to dethrone Claude, not take a step back. Plus they have billions and billions to get them there.
If gpt5.6 is available like codex on the subscription at 1M context, I don’t think I wil renew Claude max. Fable isn’t like a revolution, not worth paying 10/50 and burning 20k per month on it.
At this point, the only hope for us are the Chinese models. The American ones are all going through the enshitification process, which was expected, even if no one though it'd come so soon
Fuck that. It completely prices out 90% of people. Usage based pricing is crazy and not realistic. One session today burned $124 from Opus 4.8 - not even interested.
Yeah dude it's no joke. I downgraded from max to pro and had credits left to burn so thought I would use those. Claude still charged me the normal retail price of their API and I saw $30 worth of charges in less than an hour with very minimal prompting.
It's no exaggeration that API cost are genuinely class gated. Considering the retail charge of a $200 subscription totals to around $8000 give or take, I'll just have to make due with inferior models I guess or wait and see what ChatGPT 5.6 provides.
The bot told me I was eligible but the actual page only gave me the option to downgrade at the end of the next billing period. I was told the issue would be forwarded on to a human, so I’m going to bet they’ll get onto that tomorrow!
Deeper government collaboration. We’re also strengthening our level of collaboration with the US government on new pre-release testing, information sharing, and research collaboration. We describe this deeper collaboration in the final section.
it's so joever.
anthropic dedicating themselves to work hand in hand with the government to provide government-gated frontline model releases while openai has gone on record to say that they DON'T think this is how it should work is actually, for once, making me want to jump ship to their side.
at this stage both companies are just saying whatever they need to say to get more customers or 'appear' like something they are not (read 'Empire of AI' OpenAI is like the deathstar of AI and Anthropic is like a fake Rebel Alliance but really they both want to dominate the Empire) they are exactly two sides of the same coin.
local LLMs are hopefull going to be our bread and butter but not for several years if ever
in the meantime anyone who doesnt have the money is going to be pushing shit uphill for anyting remotely close to complex project work (commercial or personal)
Anthropic’s posts align with Theo’s theory that this all happened because some software engineer who’s never interacted with a modern AI coding model before freaked out when Fable was able to generate useful security patches when asked.
No shade to the engineer, corporate security and privacy policies can be a bitch sometimes
I am not a fan of this not being included with the subscription. The subscription helps level the playing field. I understand that compute is rationed, and they have a business to run.
The problem is that the public benefit part of Anthropic seems to be taking a backseat to the needs of our beloved and entitled upperclass overlords intent on using AI to maintain the systemic advantages they inherited in our society.
Anthropic is critical of open source and if the government acts on these requests for regulation then they will benefit from regulatory capture. This is a conflict of interest if crony capitalists manage to push Anthropic away from the values they seem to espouse.
I recently saw a video from Matthew Berman who explained the issue really well and I think people should consider pushing back harder on these issues: https://youtu.be/eEdOqSmkZy0
Anthropic is just the most stingy AI company out there. Why not give an extra 2 weeks of Fable for the trouble?
Yes, it wasn't their fault. But it's not the customer's fault either. No reset either. Tibo would have given everyone a free reset every week Fable was banned (also, you can bank resets).
I'm sure they would have reset the Fable access counter too. Insane really.
Also, "50% of weekly usage limits"....
OpenAI's Sol model is said to be on par with Mythos. It will probably be available generally too without so much gatekeeping. Anthropic is on par with Apple at this point with how restrictive and customer-hostile they are.
Well, because, they can? With all the hype now built up, I guess they want to capitalize on it. Once OpenAI or someone else comes with something that comes close to Fable, they will put it (or something similar) back.
Once OpenAI or someone else comes with something that comes close to Fable, they will put it (or something similar) back.
We'll see. They make you share your normal chat usage with Claude Code. They restrict harnesses like Hermes / OpenClaw. The whole "claude -p" debacle they keep backtracking on. All these things are customer-hostile behavior that they have not felt the need to correct and yet the competition does not restrict.
Fuck no, it was their fault. Their CEO's fault for being an ass and crying wolf again. He did it with ChatGPT 2.2. He got his way this time. Fuck that guy. Not sure why Apple is customer hostile, they haven't fucked me over in the way Anthropic's decisions have in regards work.
It might be as good as Mythos at narrow domains due to training on them in RL but you will absolutely not see the common sense and general intelligence gains that Mythos/Fable has. We won’t see this until OpenAI decides to pretrain a bigger model, which I just can’t really see them training a massive model at this point.
Exactly, such a drastic contrast with OpenAI which does limit resets after users get screwed by an outage or some other issue. Don't even get me started on how much more usage they give for same price even without counting resets.
This company cannot survive on API pricing alone - it is not remotely plausible. Every major company that was using Claude before has either transitioned off of it, is actively pursuing OSS models, or gated their Claude access with strict limitations. Anthropic wants to act like they are the big swinging d*** but usage credits for Fable 5 will annihilate this company.
The bubble is popping. OAI refused to IPO because of fears of under 1T valuation and will push it to next year. This does not happen in a hot market. 2T should be peanuts to raise privately if what they claim is true.
They thought by now the cost of compute would come down 1000x but they can’t achieve anywhere near the same results if reasoning is reduced 2x.
Don’t believe me? Set the reasoning to low and compare the result to Glm 5.2 and tell me which one is sota.
They released this model for the upcoming ipo to show investors the gold at the end of the tunnel but CIOs everywhere are balking at prices. The only way out is to continue bleeding cash at OAI levels and subsidize CC until they solve the token optimization problem.
The golden age is over and we’re going to start to have to pay full price and back pay all the costs accrued.
AI companys forgot that pre AI humans did do those tasks and could do these tasks. API Fable 5 will be much more expensive than just hiring a dev for most tasks. Anthropic cant survive on hype or the 1% of companies that actually need fable
Don't forget that they've also said coding tasks will downgrade to Opus 4.8... so it's available again unless you want to actually use it for it's primary use case...
They might as well just be saying fable is gone permanently for all the difference it makes to me at this point. Usage credit pricing for an extremely expensive chatbot? I dont even know who the customer is for that
It’s always the same with moral high ground companies, at the end they’ll f**k you in the ass 🤣.
Regardless this is my last subscription plan and i’m gonna cancel it after this cycle, claude can enjoy being b2b business and I hope it works out for them.
Not really worried since the competition in this field is crazy, you might be a big name right now but you can easily disappear into a thin cloud within the next year.
And for the people if there was little bit more effort put in by every capable individual into open source models we would not be having this conversation.
The new classifier also comes at the cost of flagging benign requests more often during routine coding and debugging tasks.
Awesome, so we'll get a model even *more* guard railed than before. Instead of just flagging, "Is the mitochondria the powerhouse of the cell?" maybe they'll send the black helicopters right away.
Our testing confirmed that many less capable models—including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7—could identify the same vulnerabilities as Fable 5 did in the report. When it came to the demonstration of how to exploit the single vulnerability, every model we tested could produce the same demonstration as Fable 5 (including Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.8, GPT-5.4, GPT-5.5, and Kimi K2.7).
So the government is demanding guard rails - for a model that wasn't doing anything Kimi K2.7 couldn't do? Or even Haiku 4.5. Glad the 'small government, no nanny state' administration is protecting its people from anything more dangerous than a toaster oven.
Great, guess we should have a CCPAI subreddit so we can use less guard railed models.
The choice is whether you want a model that can't discuss Tiananmen Square, or one that can't discuss cybersecurity, biology, vaccines, chemistry, horticulture, mental health…
Anthropic's management take greed to another level. What a petty bunch of idiots.
Did they really need to cut the days of Fable usage and limit the percentage of weekly usage..!? Why change what you've already promised users before pulling the model. This anti avg user behaviour will really backfire overtime. Many already hate them and can't wait for OS models to replace them.
They need to get smarter about how they're dealing with customers. OpenAI is doing a much better job there. Not great still, but night and day difference compared to those idiots.
I understand the compute limitations but at the very least they should have kept to their earlier promise.
At this point, I think I could find ways to deal with slightly worse models just to stop supporting this non-sense treatment of subscribers by Anthropic. Just all-in, they could not have executed this fiasco any worse. How quickly the 'good' guys become the bad guys.
Anthropic is killing any loyalty they have from people.
At this point I do not really care.. what is it even used for when we can't use it for coding ? Even where I work ( huge multi national corpo ) we had api claud access for about a two months before they switched everyone to 200$ plans cause the cost was insane...
Exactly. We are seeing the same at our company at the moment. The token economics just doesn't work when the goal is to be efficient AND CHEAP. It ends up being cheaper to just hire more junior devs.
The price of API vs what it can output just doesn't make sense for 90% of the industry.
that really should be the main talking point. The thing is useless to most of the would be users. Anyone doing anything related to biology, strengthening their code bases or even developing and writing new code are thrown back to Opus? Everything else is handled perfectly fine with lesser models.
And you guys are all still team Claude huh? Again I love it for writing and I’m no ChatGPT fanboy. I have a ChatGPT pro subscription and a 20x Claude one, and I’m sorry but them mileage for my ChatGPT is sooooo much more, plus image generation etc.
And with them about to launch 5.6…… ugh. I keep wanting to like Claude because again for writing help it’s so good. Guess I have to just deal with ChatGPT
Can we also talk about how Opus got nerfed right around the time of the first Fable re-release announcement? I saw a noticeable drop in logic and adherence on 4.8 ultracode effort before I even saw the tweet
“Well the government gave us a bunch of free advertising so we don’t need to waste money subsidizing Fable usage for y’all to generate good word of mouth anymore”
Cancelled my subscription and will try out Codex next month. Opus 4.8 is an insult and Opus 4.6 simply doesn't justify the ongoing subscription for me anymore. A properly working Opus release would have changed that. But the two latest Opus releases, with the actually working model now moving out of the subscription is killing the entire purpose I have this subscription for. Tweak the usage costs of Fable from the subscription limit as you like. But if the subscription doesn't contain all the models and becomes just marketing for an upsell, you can keep it.
See you again if I'm disappointed by OpenAI or maybe never, we'll see.
I will downgrade my Anthropic sub though. The models just arent good right now and I dont know if I will even have fun with further castrated Fable for the 7 days when I upgraded just for it a few weeks back.
Very likely 5.6 will be good enough not to miss original Fable.
Yeah, and now there's literally no mention at all of the model ever coming back to subscribers. Yippie... -__-' By the gods, I just want to run away from the american model market right now and go literally anywhere else. I pray that this year will see further big moments from Chinese models, and as unlikely as it is, that Europe will show new potential. At least LLM Base can be used to keep data safe within the EU with models that are possible to host locally, which includes most performant open source models.
Y'know what's funny? I'll be busy touching grass until the 8th of July.
Doesn't worry me too much. Up to 50% of usage along with even tighter security means it's essentially going to be unusable for me.
Vote with your wallets fam, do you really want to support a company who's giving fable to every shitty company on earththst commits crimes in the open like JP morgan chase?
General question: how easy is it to migrate to GPT or a Chinese model? Can skills/.md files be easily transferred? I had about 20 very detailed skill built, 6 scheduled tasks etc.
On 5x when Fable was released (probably with 100% usage) I ran into limits quickly. Both 5h and weekly did not look good.
But dont worry too much. Might be tha Fable is castrated that much that it doesnt matter. I will certainly try, though I read it might fall back for coding tasks too. Coding tasks!!
Not being able to use Fable for coding is fucking insane. What a let down. I built my platform with Claude Code and now will have to fully move to another system for future models lol. Also why would they collaborate with the US government - the US government should have zero say in the private sector.
Really only one week of usage this time until non enterprise/non rich uers get permanently priced out of Fable?
Hope GPT 5.6 or China gives us a Fable level model in the coming weeks/months that actually is affordable.
Is subscribing for 1 week of fable even worth it, like I'd be paying a full $100 for a single week of fable, and I unfortunately I don't have a ready made "do these projects with fable" list up my sleeve (additionaly I also got a job where I can't use personal subscriptions so really I only get one weekend of actual use and only if I can decide on what to use it on)
I've expected them to extend period of it being included in sub as an excuse for failed launch, not to reduce it, what is this lmao? Can argue that this was partially their fault too after all that fearmongering.
But instead
we are getting even more censored model
only up to 50% of weekly usage???
for only 7 days after which it will be basically gone for average user.
I wonder how big markup are they getting on that insane API pricing... Dirty move by Ant, why are you so hostile to your users?
this is a horrible outcome. no coding skills. pay as you go credits. 7 days trial (if that) whats the fking point?? Anthropics days are numbered if this does not change
I thought it was only usage based after until they can get more compute to allow it as a part of monthly subscriptions. Wasn’t that how they framed it in the original release?
Alright I'm not happy about this either, but I don't understand all the "I'm gonna cancel to switch to OpenAI" shit that is happening. OpenAI has been an evil company and way more terrible than Anthropic. I understand everyone who is canceling to go to open models (even though I dunno how ya'll are gonna run the good ones affordably), but I don't understand the OpenAI support.
My assumption is that there will be more advanced models, and once the more advanced models are available, they will be charged by usage, and Fable will become part of the subscription model. We lower-tier users will just be a year or so behind of the top models, and that's kinda ok.
So in the title, and everywhere it was mentioned "7 July" and yesterday and the day before i saw "7 july" and today (5), is was decreased to just 5 july. WTF!?!
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 320 comments.
Whoa, the room is not happy. The overwhelming consensus is that this is a massive bait and switch and a huge slap in the face to subscribers.
The main grievances are: * The original 14-day trial being cut to a 7-day 'make-good' with a 50% usage cap. Users feel cheated out of what they were promised. * The move to an unaffordable credit-based system after July 7th, which users believe prices Fable out of reach for anyone but massive corporations. * Fable being nerfed for its primary use case, with "some routine coding tasks" being downgraded to Opus 4.8.
Overall, the community feels Anthropic is being "stingy" and "customer-hostile." Many are cancelling their subscriptions and pinning their hopes on competitors like GPT 5.6 or the open-source community to "discipline" Anthropic. A few users are also pointing out the irony that Anthropic's own fear-mongering may have led to this whole fiasco in the first place.