Fable gets another bump
Simon Willison Simon Willison ● Covered by 3 sources
Anthropic extended the availability of Claude Fable 5 through July 19 across all paid plans, keeping it accessible at half of weekly usage limits. The deadline has been pushed back multiple times due to compute constraints, while OpenAI removed usage restrictions on GPT-5.6 Sol and reported 6 million active users. The uncertainty around Fable's permanent status is giving OpenAI a competitive advantage in retaining subscribers.
Why it matters
One of the consequences of GPT-5.6 Sol being clearly a Fable/Mythos class model is that Anthropic have, once again, bumped the date that Fable stops being available in their Claude Max plans: 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. As before, you can use up to half of your weekly usage limit on Fable 5. After that, you can continue using Fable 5 with usage credits, or switch to another model to keep working within your remaining limits. Anthropic's original rationale for this was compute constraints - they wanted a better idea of both demand and compute availability before committing to keeping the new model cheap for subscribers. OpenAI appear confident that they won't need to restrict access to GPT-5.6 in the same way. Here's Thibault Sottiaux this morning: The last 48 hours of Codex and ChatGPT Work have been intense! Three important updates: Temporarily removing the 5 hour usage limit
