Anthropic Fable 5 shifts to usage‑based pricing

Anthropic announced that its high‑end AI model Claude Fable 5 will move from a subscription‑only offering to a usage‑based billing scheme. After a series of extensions to the free trial that was originally set to end on 22 June 2026, the free‑access window now runs until 19 July 2026. Once that date passes, users must purchase usage credits, with a minimum spend of $50. The model is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens.

The changes follow the model’s launch on 9 June 2026, a brief suspension due to a U.S. export‑control order, and subsequent demand‑driven extensions of the free tier. Anthropic says the shift reflects limited compute capacity and plans to reintegrate the model into standard subscription packages when resources allow. By contrast, OpenAI’s newly released GPT‑5.6 family is priced at roughly half the per‑token cost ($5 input, $30 output), offering a direct cost comparison for developers choosing frontier AI models.