The word "monopoly" is overused. They simply have the best model at the moment but no real monopoly-style moat or ability to crush their competition through monopoly tactics. I don't support their bait-and-switch, but if you aren't happy, don't use Anthropic. Also, as soon as someone comes up with a better model, transition won't be that painful for most users.
Re:Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access
by hungryhobbit on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @05:07PM
(#48753138)
You should actually be even more cynical!
See the link to Reddit in my comment below for more details, but the TLDR is that (as a programmer) even when you use Mythos ... Mythos will hand the work off to Opus!
Eh, I have yet to get safety-switched from Fable to Opus. Your mileage may vary.
Re:Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access
by hungryhobbit on Wednesday July 01, 2026 @05:14PM
(#48753205)
Whether it happens to 5% or 50% (or even 0.5%) of users, I think everyone should feel extremely cynical when a company offers a huge freebie of a product ... and fails to mention that any % of their customers will actually get yesterday's model.
They did talk about it at length in the post, and most of the guardrails were already there in the first release. To be clear, it shouldn't have anything to do with the user. It's the prompt, and if it switches, it'll tell ya.
Re:Claude Fable 5 Promotional Access
by unshavedyak on Thursday July 02, 2026 @03:01PM
(#48765889)
I mean for many of us this doesn’t even increase the cynicism. Ie it can’t get worse. These AI labs are already believed to be shifting behavior of these models at runtime so you never really know what you’re getting. Stability is not a thing with any provider, if you need that you have to run it locally.
I’m not offended by that because I’m already maximally offended lol.
What you say make total sense.
Late to this post, but my impression was that later models would be more efficient per task? Wouldn't they save compute released fable 5, maybe capping the effort, if it is actually a better model?
I'm totally feeling you here as well. Fable is definitely quicker to first output token on `claude.ai` (ie less internal reasoning tokens being generated), and given how much more expensive decode is than prefill, I'm sure that must pay for itself pretty nicely, on top of any architectural changes that they must have made since the opus 4 architecture was locked in.
In other words, they're saying "We know have a monopoloy and we will take all of your money until someone offers a cheaper competing product"?
And "We intend to do this as quickly as we can" read as a non-promise then as much as it does now?
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Well, I am assuming that this is all based on the fact that Anthropic have enough compute capacity to serve fable 5 now and in the future, and they're "only" limiting it in the coming week to get richer quicker. Since compute hardware is presumably relatively un-fungible, I'm assuming Anthropic isn't offering a week of fable-5 for everyone on rented hardware that they're paying exporbitant fees for?
In other words, my cynical read is "if they can serve it under the terms of subscription plans for a week", then they could serve it under the same terms for a month?