Anthropic painted itself into a corner with fable at many turns and this latest twist is one of the more interesting. Either fable is too expensive to run at scale, or they’re trying to incentivize mega spend on tokens, or whatever - but them locking the frontier model away for the few enterprises willing to spend top dollar while codex is including frontier in the subscription (and I’ve found it also is both less token hungry and the limits are much higher for codex) has finally made me put Claude aside and use it as my backup for very specific tasks, where codex has filled that spot for a long time now.
50% more weekly limit, but no fable. Ok. I might have a refactoring job somewhere for you Claude for those extra tokens.
Not really. It’s the definition of a tight market with two leaders.
When folks start running various rando open-source models locally instead of well-recognized brands, then we will have evidence of fungibility and thus commoditization.
Just that given its cost efficiency, claude subscription isn't attractive at all when fable is removed.
The challenge I think for codex is the restriction on context size and the constantly rolling compactions. They are less aggressive or disruptive but it is still annoying you can’t force a 1mm context window on a 1mm context window model.
But it’s recall beyond compaction boundaries is much better than Claude code. The impact of compaction is much less noticeable.
Performance on task work is between fable and opus, but the marginal utility between that gap is not enough to pay extra.
On one hand the thing they are offering is legit great, and how do you get people to use/understand a whole new type of thing without offering them some for free?
On the other hand ... you really gonna get people used to an extra 50% then take it away? When this has been most of your new signups experience with the system?
The predictable pushback when people realize the workflows they developed over these two months are no longer viable will be ... quite something.
Or discovering different parts of the year have less demand than expected (like summer holidays).
This is not to discount anything you're saying, only additional factors.
- Temporarily removing the 5 hour usage limit restriction for all Plus, Business and Pro plans
- Rolling out changes that will make GPT 5.6 Sol more efficient across the board and that will be reflected in less usage being used so that it can take you further. Exact impact to be quantified and shared
- We hit 6M active users, and are landing a usage reset in the next hour
Before ChatGPT there was some amount of dignity to AI research labs, but no more. It's crazy to see how far things have fallen in just a few years.
These manipulative flip-flop monetization tactics are worse than gatcha games and Roblox, and everyone's eating it up like it's normal and they didn't notice the frog got boiled.
They try to push the narrative of having the best models but people finally discovered that Chinese models are actually great and a lot cheaper, I don't even think this is a reaction to GPT 5.6
- They've had to commit to minimum spend with their suppliers and their actual usage is below that level, so they might as well give it to end-users. That implies either their demand is waning or their forecasts were off.
- They want the usage numbers for this period to be higher and are willing to spend money to achieve it. I guess if they're about to IPO maybe showing more usage is good?
- They've got a lot of competition and want to keep market share. With lots of new models coming out, some of them much cheaper than Anthropic's options, you can see why this might make sense but it's effectively burning cash, so they won't want to keep doing that for long I'd guess...
This is almost certainly a reaction to GPT 5.6, which IMO is better positioned than Fable from a cost perspective. It's crazy to see how the tides change between labs every few months.
>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.
One minute I'm trying to use an entire week's worth of quota in less than 24 hours, then moments later I read the deadline has been punted and I have only 25% remaining to last me an entire week. This alone is enough for me to switch back to Codex once my current Claude sub ends.
So they either need to significantly increase usage or actually hike prices. But the second option exposes them to the risk of by undercut by open models which are priced only slightly above marginal cost.
At some point a lot of users might start thinking that Deepseek/GLM at 10th the price or less (based on Operouter pricing, using Deepseek itself for inference is of course not an option for a lot of companies) which just good enough for most use cases.
There's a lot of different ways to calculate "profitable" depending on what's included or excluded...
Who is using Fable?
But 50% more limit is completely unexpected to me
Can you point to data that suggests rate of token revenue growth is slowing ? This announcement, and the price cuts from openai are hints in the direction of pressure from open weights models but not conclusive.
> From May 13, 2026 through July 19, 2026, your weekly usage limit in Claude Code is 50% higher. 5-hour usage limits are not affected by this promotion.
I subscribed to AI to avoid coding, but I'm still coding. I'm just using it as an overseer