RETIRED MODEL
A new tier above Opus, released June 9, 2026. 1M-token context, 128K output, adaptive thinking, vision, native web search. $10/$50 per million tokens.
Claude Fable 5 is no longer part of the Council AI lineup. It was superseded by Claude Fable 5.1, which is available on every paid plan. The specs below are kept for reference.
Claude Fable 5 has been retired from Council AI. Council AI now runs Claude Fable 5.1 in its place. Existing conversations that used it still render correctly; it can no longer be added to a new council.
Before June 2026, Opus was the top of the Claude range. Fable 5 changes the ladder: it sits above Opus 4.8 rather than replacing it. Both run 1M context, vision, and native web search — the deltas are reasoning ceiling, the 128K output limit, and price. Opus 4.8 ($5/$25) remains Anthropic's coding and agent workhorse; Fable 5 ($10/$50) is what you reach for when the task is genuinely hard: ambiguous research questions, agent runs that keep failing partway, architecture decisions with long dependency chains. If you're unsure which you need, you probably need Opus 4.8.
Fable 5 is available on every paid Council AI plan (Plus, Pro, and Ultra) with no separate Anthropic account or API key. In a council run it answers in parallel with models from up to 8 other labs — OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Moonshot, Z.ai — and the moderator synthesizes a consensus answer with an agreement score. Because Fable 5 is the priciest voice in the lineup, a common pattern is to seat it in councils only for high-stakes prompts and let cheaper models carry routine fan-outs; your plan's monthly budget cap keeps the spend bounded either way.
$10.00 per million input tokens and $50.00 per million output tokens — double Claude Opus 4.8's $5/$25. On Council AI it's bundled into monthly plan budgets, so there's no per-call billing.
1,000,000 tokens of input context, with a 128,000-token output limit — the largest output budget in the Claude line.
No — it's a new tier above Opus. Claude Opus 4.8 remains in the lineup at $5/$25 as the coding and agent workhorse; Fable 5 sits above it for the hardest reasoning and longest agent runs.
Fable 5 decides how much internal reasoning each request needs — there is no user-set thinking budget and no sampling parameters like temperature. You trade knob control for consistently calibrated effort.
Yes — on all paid plans (Plus, Pro, Ultra). It runs in parallel councils alongside GPT-5.6, Gemini, Grok, and models from five other labs, with the moderator scoring agreement across their answers.