Fable 5's second act on Claude ends today, unless you're willing to pay more

Fable 5, Anthropic’s most powerful Claude model yet, debuted last month. Just days later, well before anyone could truly test its widely discussed ability to launch full-blown cyberattacks, the US government curbed exports and prevented users from other countries from accessing it, citing national security concerns. Even though Fable 5 returned last week, it will soon be gone again for most of the users.

That’s because starting tomorrow, July 8 (12 AM, Pacific Time), Claude will restrict Fable 5 usage to pay-per-use accounts only. That means, even if you have a Pro account for Claude, you wouldn’t be able to access the newer model and would only be limited to the less formidable ones, such as Opus 4.8, Haiku 4.5, and the newly launched Sonnet 5.

To be able to use Fable 5, you can either buy additional usage credits along with your standard subscription tiers or switch to an API-based deployment in a virtual private server (VPS). In either case, you would be charged according to Claude’s standard pricing for API usage. For Fable 5, it stands at $10 per million tokens input and $50 per million tokens output (with additional charges for caching prompts).

It’s thankfully not the end of the road for Fable 5 on regular plans. Thariq Shihipar, an engineer at Claude Code, recently suggested on X that the company plans to restore Fable as part of the standard plans soon. However, that would happen when “capacity allows,” and there’s no guaranteed timeline at the moment.

And looking at the fact that Anthropic cut unrestricted usage to one week (from the two weeks it initially announced at the time of launch), it may not be soon.