It appears to be working for me, but... Maybe it's silently degrading? It's hard to say.

The fact that it's hard to say is funny, in contrast with the fanfare surrounding the launch of Fable.

Fable is currently way below many other models in the rankings due to some sort of internal throttling https://aistupidlevel.info/

GPT-5.4 is currently the strongest model (this changes hourly)

Methodology: https://aistupidlevel.info/faq#methodology

Well, that's certainly some web design.

Methodology leaves a lot to be desired in terms of understanding the tasks you've used. Being detailed about why they're more meaningful tests than the long horizon and coding tests used by other rankings is important.

False positives and poorly defined tasks/acceptance criteria have let some models have insanely inflated scores on bad benchmarks.

And sure, you can say they're not disclosed to prevent gaming, but if you're the only one who can review them then the might as well be a random number generator display with an unreadable UI.

You're not wrong, but the scores track with my experience switching between the proposed top variants. So there's my unscientific "evidence."

I don't know how fast they reacted, but shortly after their documented time I started getting opus availability errors from fable requests, which seemed odd.

I'd also think that they would transparently degrade, just to prevent production outages for clients that are requesting Fable explicitly.

I mean hard to say on such short notice because they can swap out models without any notice. In terms of performance, I'm not asking it to do anything crazy so I think results would be similar across both models.

It did just use a small harness to run docker compose with different envs and other settings to validate a very small change, so... Feels like Fable

No, I mean I was using fable (or, trying) and got an api error "Error: claude-opus-4-8[1m] is temporarily unavailable"

> Maybe it's silently degrading? It's hard to say.

Opus 4.8 spams a lot more text. It'd be obvious.

But token price is still fable level?

It is gone for me now.

> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it.

Yep took a while but it's down. It's still in the model picker but it's broken

Restart Claude Code and pick up the update to see the acknowledgement that Fable is gone.

I hadn't, but then 2.1.177 dropped in on auto-update and I assumed that was going to be the end of Fable for me, but I'm still on it. At least that's what the model picker is continuing to say along with the header.

    Claude Code v2.1.177
  Fable 5 with low effort · Claude Max
       ~/testing

Never mind, it failed a few minutes later with: There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.

And now we're done. Oh well.

This is just Anthropic being nice enough to wean us off before the 22nd.

Edit: https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

I was using Fable to review my codebase and came back from the gym an hour later to find that I had suddenly used up my entire Max plan quota for the next 5 hours

(I have never had an agent do enough to burn up the 5 hour quota on Max)

(edit: just switched my CC model to 4.8 and my 5-hr cycle reset back to 0%, even though it previously had 2 more hours to go)

ssshhhh don't tell anybody it's still working, i have some stuff to do :-)

I still also have access, so either they silently reroute Fable 5 to Opus 4.8 or hasn't actually pulled the switch yet.

You'll never know. They'll just silently sabotage if you're foreign national.

Mythos escaped by itself, of course. You can't dictate the rules to a clever model like that :)

> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.

It identifies as Fable 5 for me, but it could just be Opus with the Fable system prompt.

Why would they do that?

So you eat your usage quota twice as fast or pay for API requests twice as much.

No, still cracking on with a bug fix. Definitely feels like it's still Fable.

Anthropic has just reset usage limits.

I just got done now:

> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.

Just turned off for me on Claude Code. Good while it lasted.

Not working for me.

Working fine for me.

Still works for me but I don't know if it's gaslighting me or not... fool me once situation here...

I lost it just now. Had a workflow running. :(

shush, lol

edit: And... it's gone

> There's an issue with the selected model (claude-fable-5). It may not exist or you may not have access to it. Run /model to pick a different model.

DELETE THIS