It’s not so much generosity that’s behind Anthropic’s decision to extend free access to its most advanced model, Fable, for paid subscribers until July 19, analysts say. Its a last-minute move to grab users, data and model evaluation results.
After the free-access period, Anthropic plans to convert Fable to a pay-per-use model, at $10 per million input tokens and a whopping $50 for 1 million output tokens.
That is double the price of its next most advanced model, Opus 4.8, for input and output tokens. “We’re extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code’s weekly rate limits 50% higher, through July 19,” Anthropic’s team said in a July 12 tweet.
Anthropic keeps extending Fable because it does not yet know what its flagship is worth, said Sanchit Vir Gogia, principal analyst at Greyhound Research. “A vendor confident in its price does not move the same cutoff twice in six days, both times at the wire,” Gogia said.
Anthropic is essentially pushing deadlines to test its products, while users gain by being able to put their toughest tasks to Fable, Gogia said.
