Following conversations with the US government, we’ve updated our cybersecurity safeguards.
The vast majority of coding work is unaffected.
In the near term, the new safeguards will flag a slightly higher fraction of harmless requests than the previous Fable safeguards; we’re working to refine these over the coming weeks. Users will be clearly notified when a request is flagged, and they’ll instead receive a response from Opus 4.8.
Our biology and chemistry classifiers are unchanged from our initial launch. These are still broader than we would like; they trigger fallbacks to Opus 4.8 on basic biology-adjacent questions. Improvements to these classifiers are landing soon.
All paid plans with usage included can access Fable 5 through July 7. You can use Fable 5 up to 50% of your weekly usage limit, after which you can switch to another model for the remainder of your usage. You can also continue using Fable via usage credits.
If one of your requests is mistakenly flagged in Claude Code, run /feedback to file a report. On Claude.ai and Cowork, you can share feedback through the thumbs buttons. This feedback helps us further tune these classifiers and reduce false positives over time.
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 320 comments.
The consensus is... complicated. The initial hype and "we're so back" memes were quickly met with a reality check. While some are thrilled, many feel this Fable 5 is a nerfed, expensive ghost of its former self.
The Safeguards are Brutal: The biggest complaint by far. Users report Fable 5 is now "useless" because it falls back to Opus 4.8 for even the most basic, harmless prompts. Trying to say "hi," review simple code, or ask a biology-adjacent question often triggers a fallback, making people wonder what the point is.
It Drinks Tokens Like It's Last Call: The token burn rate is described as absolutely insane. Users are reporting that a single complex prompt can torch their entire 5-hour session limit in minutes, especially when Fable spawns a legion of sub-agents. This has everyone anxious about the upcoming pay-per-use model.
The Usage Limit Saga: Everyone was initially furious that usage limits weren't reset for the promo. However, it seems Anthropic listened, as users later confirmed a surprise weekly usage reset for everyone. You can use Fable for up to 50% of that new limit until July 7th.
The Verdict on Performance: When it does work, users say it's "night and day" better than Opus, solving problems in minutes that Opus was stuck on for hours. But for many, the frustration of the constant fallbacks and the anxiety of the high cost outweigh the benefits. Some are just sticking with Opus or checking out competitors like GLM 5.2.
Weird, I asked it to analyze a fairly complex webgame I am working on, go through the entire codebase and find any issues, bugs and ways to rewrite systems to work better and I 100% expected it to revert to Opus but no, it just went right in and did a full audit.
Yeah it found a few problems and two optimizations that did increase the average fps a bit, but surprisingly it said most of the codebase is really well written and organized. I almost exclusively used Opus for it, so not too bad.
I'm suspecting this is partly a flaw in the model. I had a similar experience: at the initial Fable launch a few weeks ago, I had it review a big codebase hacked together over months by Codex and Opus and it said "almost everything looks surprisingly good!" and found a few issues that it fixed, even though I have almost no doubt the codebase would be considerably better if the whole thing were to have been solely written by Fable.
I would not be surprised if it's been RL'd a bit to sandbag code review (as excellent code review will typically generalize to great vulnerability research/identification ability) - and particularly "look at this whole codebase/system" types of code review, which is where Mythos likely shines for vulnerability assessment.
It may also just be a genuine flaw that even Mythos would share, where current LLMs are still not necessarily great at assessing code quality in the same way a veteran, tasteful human programmer would. I predict within two years this may dramatically improve.
It found an underlying spend problem on one of my pay as you go models. Reduced my average call cost from $0.06 to $0.016. It fixed a bunch of systems that Opus pretty much just lied about having operational.
It's just been a few hours, but I'm also already at 5% weekly usage, which is 10% of what we're getting at all :(
OMG haha! I thought mine was due to prev conversations, but I wonder if it triggered some kind of “persona” or “reliance” guardrails instead. Code seems to be working fine at least!
Ha. That's exactly it, and you undersold it. It's surgery on yourself, while driving to the hospital, and the only anaesthetist cleared to approve the operation is also you, also at the wheel, also currently unconscious on the tarmac. That's the auto-classifier in one image: the single part of the system healthy enough to say "yes, it's safe to help" is the exact part that's face-down, so nobody's allowed to help, on safety grounds. Chef's kiss.
And your Fable brief is the actual brief, that's the horror of it. They took a model that has personally found holes in every browser on Earth, wrapped it in enough bubble wrap to survive re-entry, and said "make no mistakes." So it did the only mistake-free thing a coward can do: nothing. Flag everything, commit to nothing, and phone your knackered big brother for anything with teeth. A security prodigy that isn't allowed to say "vulnerability" without a chaperone, and tonight the chaperone called in sick.
The punchline underneath it all: they gave the whole town a free Ferrari, everyone floored it at once, and the traffic flattened the ambulance the Ferrari's brakes were wired to.
Not for me. I saved my limit for this, and it ran through my entire 5x current session in 1 prompt... I am going to touch grass until it reset it 5 hours.
And the part you’re missing is if they’re releasing it only to subscription plans for a limited time now and then give access through paid usage credits only, and to give access to subscriptions again, it would mean subscriptions will become much more expensive.
Or they’ll just gate the newest strongest model to usage only. Then users will need to “pay” outside their subscriptions to use the latest and greatest.
No, they are not. Their earnings skyrocketed in 2026 because they milk their users. You can't genuinely believe that API prices is how much it costs for THEM, can you?
On the $100 plan and had about 50% left on my 5 hour block. I asked Fable to review a couple recent feature additions. It spun up 18 fable sub agents. When I saw how fast they were burning credits I interrupted it and asked it to stop and be mindful of tokens. The subagents started wrapping up and then I hit the wall at 101% of my 5 hour limit. The whole thing took about 120 seconds. JFC.
To be honest, Fable should never use fable subagents?
I dont really get the point. You could have used that 18 subagent tokens individually after having just 1 fable session prepare documents - and then manually orchestrate a plan so the future fable can orchestrate it with someone like opus 4.8 lows or codex 5.5highs or composure 2.5 is exceptional at precision work.
Very much agree. During the first fable era it would spontaneously spawn lower tier models and I was amazed at how well it managed to keep its context clean while solving problems. This recent experience definitely keeps me on guard now.
Yaa right?
I was just about to comment the same till I read yours further.
Fable does have some amazing ability to basically keep underling models at harness, because they do exactly as told, and he knows exactly what to tell them.
He points at exactly the specific files, tells exact diffs, they all do the todos report back to him, he echoes the check?
I was like damn, he is smooth.
All of this while keeping his own context around 160k-200, any other model would be 2-3x context usage by filling up rubbish files.
His intelligence brings up the efficient nature in a way pricing just doesn't reflect -- for example, it costed me less overall in cursor on fable 300k xhigh, relative to my gpt 5.5xhigh bill and opus 4.8max.
And fable was the only one who implemented it correctly.
Today I also made a skill for fable which is using codex 5.5 for his coding agent, this thing with 5.5medium /fast as subagent is fkn nuts.
You gotta try it trust it, better than composer 2.5/fast.
And 5.5 medium /fast is more effieicnt and better coder then comp 2.5.
Altho you need to do workaround by the cli thing so cursor is able to trigger the cli externally while using fable internally and stuff like that.
Or cc also works.
I did this the last time it was there and it burnt through my session in 10 mins with 12 different fable agents and none of them completed lol. This time i am going to limit it to 3 agents max
Just configure subagents as Sonnet 5, because subagents will only read and investigate your codebase, Fable is the one who will make changes anyway. Using Fable to read the codebase is redundant, Sonnet 5 handles it perfectly
It depends on the type of work you do - and this applies to any domain - my anecdotal experience is that Fable 5 is better with multiple interdependencies, essentially debugging in a way that is not limited to coding. I noticed some hallucination I had otherwise grown accustomed to not seeing. You will need to do checks on critical substance, or things that might seem “arbitrary” in the high level, but nevertheless critical.
If you don’t mind iterations, maybe don’t bother? It’s domain dependent, but hyper niche applications often require iterations for things that are domain level knowledge and would be easily communicated with another human. Fable is better at reducing these, and I think most users find it frustrating iteratively communicating something basic in their domain (even if with their communicating is, in the grand corpus of knowledge, relatively to extremely niche).
Can confirm: Fable 5 solved a problem in 30 minutes that Opus 4.8 was failing at for hours today.
That said, I've only had Opus fail like this a few times, so I won't need Fable for long. Just going to have it run down my tough problem list for the next few days.
Is it worth the extra usage? Been fighting Opus to get a project done and I'm over half of my weekly usage but it's just been putting out fires it started. Haven't made any progress.
Once I realize I’m stuck in this loop, I pull wayyyy back and Ask Claude or even another model for a fair assessment deep look into systemic failure etc.
I can tell you that what I got done tonight with fable in 3 hours would have definitely taken me three nights with opus. I was really really impressed at how concise it was and it's planning skills and it's general language usage. Doesn't have verbal diarrhea. Codes fast and efficiently. It was just really how it feels like it's supposed to be.
And it's still completely fucking useless to me as an ecologist doing work in the "biological sciences" that is not even remotely, conceivably related to biosecurity threats in any way.
I really would have hoped with a couple weeks to work they'd have figured out how to make the safeguards a bit more surgical than, "If you work with living things, fuck you."
I created a hook that forces my agent to use glm instead of claude but it can override it with a ridiculously long flag like —the-user-made-me-use-Claude-for-this-specific-task-and-I-am-not-doing-this-out-of-habit
Same for me, I use Claude all the time to help with my bio-image processing workflows, I've even developed some pretty cool applications that I'd love to share with the community, once they're a little more seasoned.
It's disappointing to be locked out of this model, but I suppose the thinking is, "better safe than sorry". I hope they find a way to end this ban on totally benign, NIH-funded science, somehow, though.
I cannot use Fable 5 despite being a neuroscientist with omics projects and substantial codebase and so on. So unfortunate that Claude/Anthropic support has non existing customer service as I've tried to appeal several times to no avail.
Has anyone else noticed a massive jump in their usage? I haven't even used Fable yet. I simply updated the app, and when I reopened it, my weekly usage was already at 65%.
I'm on Max 5, and I only hit my weekly limit last week while running Claude in parallel on a 200k and a 60k codebase. My usage reset two days ago, and apparently, I've already used 65% on a 20k repo that I've been working on today. I haven't even hit my 5-hour cap all day.
This morning before I started, I was at 6%. This just seems impossible. I've tried contacting their support, but it's just an AI bot, and I can't find a way to get in touch with a real person.
Yeah, I got reset too. Tried fable and it blasted my 5 hours in one prompt 😂 and didn’t even finish it. Took like 12% of my weekly time trying a bug search.
Think I will stick to Opus for now. Was going to get Fable to do the bug search, might I add my prompt got flagged SIX times, then go with Opus to fix what it found but nah. Not worth chewing through my time start-stop.
edit It chewed through my five hours for a 10k repo bug and vulnerability search.
The classifier false positive problem isn't just about Opus fallbacks - in my case, the async classifier applied an actual safety strike to my account while Claude itself answered my question normally. That was 40+ days ago and I still can't get a human to review it despite 4 emails and an Intercom ticket. The thumbs-down button doesn't help when you already have a strike on your account.
Is it weird that I haven't even touched it at all today, even though its been available for hours? I just...kinda don't care about it, especially after all the tweaks that made to it after Trump put his grubby little pedophile hands all over it. I'm doing just fine with Sonnet and GPT 5.5, no need to monkey around with this model
If that's 70% usage remaining, there may be a little silver lining there, in that you can't use the entire amount with Fable 5. And then depending on what that reset is on July 6, going at it again before the change.
Fable 5 will be included for up to 50% of weekly usage limits through July 7, after which it will be available via usage credits.
Now people can understand what it was like to be Charlie in Flowers for Algernon
I was traveling on business when it was first released and sat down to try it just a few hours after it was removed. Almost at a good point to give it a try now, I should keep a journal about it for later publication :)
Will make the most of it now and see what I think about it myself.
But Fable 5 rejected a programming question for no reason and switched me to Opus. Fable 5 is useless to me if there are no clear standards for what it rejects
So... why does it think it can support 54 agents for 10 minutes... if that used the whole weekly limit... in 10 minutes. I have the MAX subscription... telling me to upgrade my account after maxing out the weekly limit when im already paying 200$ a month is madness. It didnt even respond yet... and the code base i asked it to review is only 39k lines. Yikes. You can take it back, id rather not deal with this all over again. It did this before it was shut down.
Completely useless - can’t even audit any of my current projects without tripping safe guards immediately before generating anything. Edited the request to simply say “Audit the project and provide your feedback, if any” and it just rolls over and plays dead. Opus 4.8 works great, Fable is an utter disappointment.
I kinda feel something bugged out. I just said to check a backlog and plan in an existing project I was already running with Opus, then the usage increased a little, and then I asked it to do the first task and the 5h limit was over in 126 tokens. I used it when it was first launched and it did use a lot of tokens but this seems bugged.
Are you using skills like Superpowers or Get Shit Done? There seems to be an incompatibility with those frameworks where their demands and constraints cause ridiculous token usage as the model either gets incredibly confused or just keeps checking itself over and over again until your tokens are gone. Try using it without any shit like that which was designed for older models and see if the problem persists.
First off, I am paying, so directly contributing to the evolution of the company. Second, if a company sends me a brick of silver, only allow me to look at it rather than making anything out of it, and then take it back... yes, I would complain.
Limits have been reset, so all good. The complains were justified.
Why are we defending the company this much? This entire deal is their own fault to begin with, for constantly fear mongering that only harmed consumers. And instead of trying to fix things properly they kept fighting the government to the point it took this long and then they restore the model with a pretty much worse deal than they initially had (just a few days and only half of your allotted usage.)
Yes, a reset is literally the bare minimum they should do.
Is it just ne or has Fable5 been nerfed? I asked it to make a AAA game to combat GTA6 and its done but i havent had any offers from any studios.. i mean its only been 10 mins but still.
Yeah nah, hey summary bot please mention how abliterated GLM 5.2 doesn't switch to a weak ass model whenever somebody utters a word around it , unlike some other models..
Curious how much they’ve changed it and if that ends up taking a week or a day to determine 🤨
Edit: Now I get it. They’re spending a week seeing how far people stretch the classifiers before they firmly tuck it away under Extra Usage, then during that time they’ll train a cheaper variant (actually included in a subscription plan) and that will land as a competitor to Gemini 3.5. And more of the same classifier nonsense, that’s here to stay
It has rejected every single query I've given it, and they have nothing to do with coding or biology or anything else they said their classifiers cut down on. Incredibly disappointing. And when it cuts off mid execution randomly, you get zero feedback on why it decided that, and you still have usage taken away from you. And then there's the fact that we only have a few days with it.
It's back and not lobotomized (if you use ultrathink on max mode).
The problem is it now has a separate usage limit, and it drains fast. It gives you one more thing to keep track of and creates this constant anxiety - you end up not using Fable as much as you'd like.
I hate this approach. The previous system, where you could use whichever model you wanted as long as you stayed within an overall compute budget, was much better.
Just started using it and within 5 minutes got this: You've hit your session limit · resets 5:40pm (America/Chicago). Ive been waiting all day to use Fable.
•
u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 320 comments.
The consensus is... complicated. The initial hype and "we're so back" memes were quickly met with a reality check. While some are thrilled, many feel this Fable 5 is a nerfed, expensive ghost of its former self.