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.
Anthropic, which did not immediately reply to a request for comment about the situation, has already seen plenty of action with Fable and its sister model Mythos. Both have been touted as the company’s most advanced models yet.
Fable stumbles, then reappears
Fable was officially launched June 9. Just three days later, on June 12, the US government put export controls on it after Amazon researchers bypassed Fable’s safeguards, prompting the model to identify software vulnerabilities and demonstrate an exploit.
After Anthropic scrambled to address the issues — and after the export controls were lifted — Fable was relaunched July 1.
Fable’s freebie extension comes after OpenAI’s latest model, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol, became generally available July 9. Sol is cheaper at $5 per one million tokens input, and $30 for 1 million output tokens.
Anthropic and OpenAI are competing aggressively to build market share, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates. “Anthropic and OpenAI are looking to go public and the more users they have, the more attractive it is — even if they are not yet producing income,” he said.
In some ways, the two companies are following a well-trodden path to get customers hooked on their products and turned into paying customers. That’s what Meta, Google and Microsoft, for instance, have done over the years with various “free” offers that later morphed into paid products.
Plus, said Gold, ”The more users you have, the better you can train your models across multiple data sets.”
That’s a potential boon for proprietary large language model (LLM) vendors offering free tokens in a bid to lock enterprises and vendors into their AI environments. But numerous experts have warned enterprises not to fall for that tactic. Instead, they argue enterprises should diversify AI development across multiple AI and cloud vendors, and adopt open-source models.
An LLM space race?
According to LLM benchmarks maintained by Artificial Analysis, Fable is the most intelligent model currently available, with Sol just behind it in second place. One benchmark by LiveBench places Sol as being better in reasoning, with Fable better at math, data analysis, instruction following and language. Both models have advantages in coding.
Meanwhile, Cursor and SpaceXAI on July 8 unveiled Grok 4.5, which the companies said can “handle difficult, long-running tasks that require creatively using tools to solve problems, whether in software engineering, data science, finance, legal work, or anything else you do on a computer,” the company said in a blog entry.
Its pricing is even more aggressive than Fable and ChatGPT 5.6 Sol. Grok 4.5 charges $2 for 1 million input tokens and $6 for 1 million output tokens.
There are growing concerns about tokenmaxxing, where enterprises rack up billions of dollars in token spending, blowing past usage limits before finance controls are implemented.
Enterprises might decide to spend more on models such as Mythos and Fable — if the benefits are tangible, said Max Leaming, head of data science and AI solutions at ManpowerGroup. Fable and Mythos may “actually be less expensive to use in spite of the spiked token cost because it’s far more efficient,” he said.
A company might find that the models use fewer tokens, are faster, and can reduce compute time, he said. “Even though the per-token costs may go up, we may see overall costs go down,” Leaming said.
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