Anthropic Cuts Claude Fable Prices by 20% With Version 5.2 and Says It Now Beats Opus 5.5 on Most Tests

Anthropic's most powerful model just got cheaper and faster at the same time. The company released Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 on Monday, two months after the 5.1 versions, and dropped the price to $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens, down from $10 and $50 for Fable 5.1.

Fable and Mythos are the same underlying model. Fable ships to everyone with safeguards that block most cybersecurity and biology work. Mythos has looser limits and goes only to organizations vetted through Anthropic's cyber and life sciences verification programs. Both generate output up to 30% faster than 5.1, and an optional fast mode runs up to 2.5 times quicker for $16 and $80 per million tokens.

Ahead of Opus, on Anthropic's own scoreboard

On the company's benchmark table, Fable 5.2 leads Opus 5.5 almost everywhere. It scores 49.1% on FrontierCode 2.0, which checks whether a model's code changes would get merged by open source maintainers, against 45.5% for Opus 5.5 and 42.8% for OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra. On FrontierSWE v2 it posts 69.9% against 62.3% for Opus. The exceptions are telling: Google's Gemini 4 Carbon edges it on the AutomationBench business workflow test, and Opus 5.5 keeps a slightly higher Elo on one knowledge work benchmark.

The cost story may matter more than the peaks. Anthropic says Fable 5.2 at High effort matches Opus 5.5's best FrontierCode score for roughly half the cost per task. These are the company's own runs, though, and independent results will take a few weeks to show up.

What Anthropic says it built with it

The launch post leans on internal projects. Anthropic says more than 90% of the changes merged into its core codebase are now written by Claude, and that a team of agents running an earlier version of Fable 5.2 moved a production service from Python to Rust that now starts about 26 times faster. In one experiment, a single engineer had the model coordinate more than 1,000 subagents for eight days, starting from an empty folder, and it produced an operating system that boots on a laptop.

Mythos 5.2 is pitched at security teams. On Anthropic's CVE Rediscovery test it found 10.2% more vulnerabilities than Opus 5.5, and it also powers Claude Security for Enterprise customers.

Still not the default

Anthropic is not telling people to switch everything over. Its own guidance says to start with Opus 5.5 for most coding and knowledge work and move up to Fable only for the most ambitious, open ended jobs, or use Fable as an advisor that smaller models consult. That leaves the budget tier of agent work to models like Meta's Muse Ember, which launched the same week at a fraction of the price.

Fable 5.2 is available now in the Claude apps, on the Claude API as claude-fable-5-2, and through AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry. Paid subscribers whose plans include Fable get extra usage this week as a launch promotion.

Some offers on this page may be paid placements or contain affiliate links.