For two weeks, Anthropic ran a rolling countdown on its most powerful model.
Free access to Fable 5 inside Claude's paid plans was set to expire – on July 5, then July 12, then July 19 – and each cutoff got pushed back at the last minute, spawning a small genre of memes about users burning weekends on frantic usage binges only to be told, again, that they had a few more days.
Now the countdown is over. Anthropic says Fable is here to stay as a standard feature, being folded into Claude Max and Team Premium at no extra cost. Pro and Team Standard subscribers have to buy per-token credits to keep using it.
The whiplash might reveal just a tell about how fierce the competition has become to put the most powerful AI in front of users, especially as open-source models from Chinese firms challenge top closed-source offerings from leading U.S. AI firms.