Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic’s top-tier model line, released on June 9, 2026. It is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, and it has since been joined by Fable 5.1, which Anthropic now lists as the current Fable model. This article sets out what Anthropic’s own documentation says about the models, and where the details end.
Fable 5 at a glance
- Model ID:
claude-fable-5, released June 9, 2026. - Context window and output: 1 million tokens of context and up to 128,000 tokens of output.
- Price: $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output tokens; batch requests are 50% cheaper.
- Input and output: text and images in, text out.
- Status: Anthropic’s docs now label Fable 5 a legacy model that is still available, and recommend migrating to Fable 5.1.
All figures are from Anthropic’s Fable 5 model page.
Fable versus Mythos
Anthropic offers a sibling called Claude Mythos 5 with the same specifications and pricing, but it is offered separately for defensive cybersecurity work and is available only to organisations verified through Anthropic’s programs, such as its Cyber Verification Program. Fable is the version aimed at general use. For background on the government side of Mythos access, see our report on federal approval of Mythos.
How it compares with the rest of the lineup
Anthropic’s models overview lists these current prices per million input and output tokens:
- Claude Fable 5.1: $10 and $50, positioned for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work.
- Claude Opus 5.5: $4 and $20, positioned for long-running agentic coding and knowledge work.
- Claude Sonnet 5.5: $2 and $10, described as the best mix of speed and intelligence.
- Claude Haiku 5.5: from $0.10 and $0.50, for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks.
Anthropic’s own guidance is to start with Opus 5.5 for most workloads and move to Fable 5.1 when your tests at higher effort on Opus still fall short. Fable costs 2.5 times as much as Opus 5.5 per token, so that advice is also a cost argument.
What this means for buyers
- If you use Claude through a subscription, the model names matter less than the plan’s usage limits; check Anthropic’s plan pages for what each tier includes.
- If you build on the API, run your own evaluation on a cheaper tier first. A model that costs 2.5 times as much needs to save more than that in retries or human review.
- Because Fable 5 is now legacy, new projects should read the Fable 5.1 page first.
For a broader comparison of chatbots rather than API models, see ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini, and for the launch coverage see Anthropic launches Claude Fable.
Corrections to an earlier version
An earlier version of this article claimed Fable 5 was built on Claude 3.5 Sonnet, cost $20 a month, and generated playable browser games from text prompts, citing personal tests. None of that appears in Anthropic’s documentation and no test was performed, so it has been removed.
Sources
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