Anthropic extends free Fable 5 access to July 19, its second extension in a week

Anthropic pushed free Claude Fable 5 access — plus Claude Code's 50%-higher weekly limits — to July 19, its second last-minute extension in six days, landing the same week OpenAI shipped GPT-5.6, codenamed Sol. From July 20 Fable 5 moves to prepaid credits at $10 per million input and $50 per million output tokens, the steepest per-token rate Anthropic has set for a generally available model, with a stated aim to fold it back into subscriptions once compute capacity allows.

Source: forbes.com ↗

This is how you know Sol is a good model. Companies do not give away their best product to fight a weak rival.

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Why this matters

→ Anthropic extends free access as direct response to OpenAI's GPT-5.6 launch
→ Seven-day window enables high-stakes audits before Fable 5 moves to pay-per-token pricing
→ Model capability gaps show clearest in synthesis, long-context, and adversarial reasoning tasks

Model wars heat up