---
title: "Anthropic: Claude Fable 5 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai"
canonical: https://undominated.ai/models/anthropic__claude-fable-5/
description: "Anthropic: Claude Fable 5: $10.00/M in, $50.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper."
---

# Anthropic: Claude Fable 5 — price, capability and what beats it · Undominated.ai

> Anthropic: Claude Fable 5: $10.00/M in, $50.00/M out. Independent capability scores, context-tier pricing, and the models that are both better and cheaper.

[Leaderboard](/) / Anthropic

# Claude Fable 5

Anthropic · released 2026-06-09 · proprietary

 $20.00 per million tokens, balanced Balanced Summarise Chat Code gen Agentic

## Claude Opus 5 is both better and cheaper.

It scores **+1** higher and costs **50% less** ($10.00/M against $20.00/M) on this workload — and it does everything this model does.

The same model via **batch** is 50% cheaper ($10.00/M) — same weights, different latency.

## Our take

 editorial — not a measurement

The current top of the LMArena text board (1508) and the most expensive non-Pro model in the catalogue at $10/$50. It is priced 2x Opus 5 for roughly one index point of measured intelligence (AA 62 vs 63 for Opus 5 at max effort), which makes it a bad default and a defensible choice only for long-running agents where a single avoided failure is worth more than the token bill. Two things make the real cost worse than the sticker: it inherits the Opus 4.7-generation tokenizer, so the same text produces about 30% more tokens than a Sonnet 4.6-era model, and its measured time-to-first-token is roughly 98 seconds, which rules it out of anything interactive. Buy it for unattended overnight work, not for a chat box.

 - **Unverified in this take:** This note cites a time-to-first-token figure that the data layer withheld as implausible (it appears to be total reasoning time mislabelled at source). Treat it as unverified.
- **Unverified in this take:** Anthropic does publish a token-inflation figure, but it compares newer Claude models against EARLIER CLAUDE models — not against another vendor. The cross-vendor version of this claim is unsupported, so read any comparison to a non-Claude price with that in mind.

### Strengths

 - Highest LMArena text Arena Score observed (1508)
- Full 1M context at flat pricing — no long-context tier penalty
- 128k max output, extendable to 300k via the batch API beta header
- 50% batch discount and 0.1x cache reads apply across the whole window

### Weaknesses

 - $10/$50 per MTok — 2x Opus 5 for a marginal intelligence delta
- ~98s time-to-first-token makes it unusable interactively
- ~30% token inflation vs pre-4.7 Claude models (Anthropic's own figure) is a hidden real price rise
- Scores one AA index point below Opus 5 despite costing double

### Reach for it when

 - Long-horizon unattended agents
- Work where a retry costs more than the tokens
- Batch jobs that can absorb the latency

### Avoid it if

 - You need interactive latency
- You are cost-sensitive
- Opus 5 already passes your evals

Sources: platform.claude.com · platform.claude.com · arena.ai · artificialanalysis.ai

### Every price dimension

| Input | $10.00 /M |
| --- | --- |
| Output | $50.00 /M |
| Cached input | $1.00 /M |
| Cache write | $12.50 /M |
| Cache write 1h | $20.00 /M |
| Web search | $0.01 /call |
| Batch discount | 50% |

### Independent scores

| Intelligence | 62.1 |
| --- | --- |
| Coding | 76.5 |
| Agentic | 56.6 |
| LMArena Elo | 1494.7 default |

Sources are listed separately rather than averaged. Across the 62 models both have scored they correlate at r = 0.806 — close agreement overall, but four models rank very differently between them, and a blended score would hide exactly those.

#### Best rankings by task

 - asciiart #1 of 83 1367
- godotgamedev #1 of 43 1344
- agenticgamedev #1 of 34 1295
- htmlslides #1 of 34 1270
- agentichtmlslides #1 of 16 1254
- agenticslides(html) #1 of 16 1252
- gamedev #2 of 144 1383
- androidnative #2 of 54 1303

### Capability

| Context window | 1M |
| --- | --- |
| Max output | 128K |
| Input modes | text, image, file |
| Tool use | yes |
| Reasoning | always on |
| Open weights | no |

### Provenance

| Price source | openrouter.ai |
| --- | --- |
| Fetched | 2026-08-24 |
| Quality data | verified |
| Cross-checked | vendor page |

A published time-to-first-token figure for this model was implausible (98s) and has been withheld rather than displayed.

Claude Fable 5 is a Mythos-class model from Anthropic, built for autonomous knowledge work and coding. It supports text, image, and file inputs with text output, with reasoning support and...