Anthropic has reversed an earlier plan to pull its flagship Fable 5 model out of Claude subscriptions, opting to keep it as a standard feature for some paying users while cutting off others.
Starting July 20, Fable 5 is included in all Claude Max and Team Premium plans, capped at 50% of each plan’s standard weekly usage limits, Anthropic said in a post on its official X account. Claude Pro and Team Standard subscribers lose included access entirely: they receive a one-time $100 usage credit, after which continued use of Fable 5 requires switching to usage-based pricing at roughly $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.
A reversal, not a plan
The change caps several weeks of shifting deadlines. Fable 5 returned to subscription plans on July 1 after a temporary US export-control suspension was lifted, included at no extra cost for a limited window before Anthropic pushed subscribers toward credit-based access earlier this month. That plan has now been partly reversed: Max and Team Premium keep included access, while Pro and Team Standard do not.
Anthropic said demand for Fable 5 has been “hard to manage,” straining the compute capacity needed to serve the model at scale, and that it continues to invest in additional infrastructure.
Competitive pressure
The reversal comes as rivals undercut Fable 5 on price. OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, launched July 9, offers comparable agentic performance at a fraction of the cost, according to pricing comparisons published after its release. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, an open-weight model released July 16, has topped several coding and agent benchmarks at a much lower price than Fable 5 — pressure that likely factored into Anthropic’s decision to keep its flagship model bundled with paid plans rather than pushing more subscribers toward metered billing.
The timing adds a further squeeze for Max and Team Premium users: a temporary 50% boost to Claude Code’s weekly rate limits also expires July 20, according to the same announcement, meaning the baseline limits that Fable 5 access is now measured against are smaller than they were a day earlier.