After nearly three weeks in a government-imposed limbo, Anthropic’s powerful Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models are going back online. But irate Claude subscribers are now learning that their already brief availability window for Fable will be curtailed even further.
Fable 5 is slated to return today, July 1, according to Anthropic. Mythos 5, a more powerful model with reduced safeguards, is already available to a “set” of U.S. organizations, but is not yet being released to the general public.
In addition to being available via API, Fable 5 will also come to Claude Pro, Max, Team, and “select” Enterprise plans, but only until July 7 — just one week, or only half the period Anthropic had originally promised.
After that availability window closes, those on Claude plans will have to purchase “usage credits” for Fable, at a (much greater) cost roughly equivalent to what API users would pay.
There’s also another (new) wrinkle: Claude plan users will only be able to use Fable for up to 50 percent of their usage windows.
Incensed by the new restrictions, Claude subscribers are airing their grievances in a lengthy Reddit thread.
“Not a good look to bring Fable back and then both half the usage and take away days,” one Reddit user wrote.
“We got to use it for like 3 days out of the 14 we were told, and now we get it for just 7 days at half usage?” wrote another.
When Fable 5 and Mythos 5 were first released back on June 9, the original plan was for Claude subscribers to get access to Fable until June 23 — a period of two full weeks, without any 50 percent usage limit restriction.
But Anthropic abruptly yanked Fable and Mythos on June 12 after the U.S. government, alarmed by an Amazon report claiming the models could be easily jailbroken, slapped them with export restrictions.
While disputing the details of Amazon’s report, Anthropic said it “moved quickly to address the reported bypass,” deploying an “improved safety classifier that targets and blocks the behavior described in the report.”
There had already been grumbling that Fable was too quick to reject certain requests, especially those regarding cybersecurity and biology, and was even steering users away from sensitive topics without telling them why.
More eyebrows were raised when Anthropic said on a social post that “some routine tasks like coding and debugging will fall back to Opus 4.8,” a less powerful model.
