Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 today, June 9, 2026 — a Mythos-class model the company says delivers capabilities that "exceed those of any model we've ever made generally available." If you pay for Claude through the API, you already have it at full availability. If you're on a subscription — Pro, Max, Team, or seat-based Enterprise — you have it too, but only for a limited window, and the announcement is conspicuously quiet on the practical part: how do you actually switch to Fable 5, and how do you know it's on?
This guide fills that gap.
The clock: what's free, and until when
Anthropic is rolling Fable 5 out to subscription plans "more conservatively" because demand is high and hard to predict. In plain terms:
| Window | Pro / Max / Team / seat-based Enterprise | API / consumption-based Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| June 9 – 22 | Fable 5 included at no extra cost | Fully available |
| June 23 onward | Removed from plans — using it requires usage credits | Unchanged |
| Later | Restored as a standard part of plans "as quickly as we can," once capacity allows | — |
Two things worth underlining. First, if capacity allows, Anthropic says it may extend the included window past June 22 — so the cutoff could move, but plan as if it won't. Second, Anthropic has committed to communicating any change ahead of time, so watch the in-app notices and your plan's status page.
The takeaway: the next two weeks are the cheapest Fable 5 will ever be for a subscriber. Treat it as a free trial of a frontier model and put your hardest real work through it before the 23rd.
How to switch to Fable 5 on the web and desktop app
Fable 5 shows up like any other model — in the model picker. There's no setting to flip, no waitlist to join, no separate URL.
- Open claude.ai (or the macOS/Windows desktop app) and start or open a conversation.
- Click the model selector — the dropdown showing the current model name, near the message box at the top of the chat.
- Pick Claude Fable 5 from the list.
- That becomes your model for new conversations until you change it again.
If you don't see Fable 5 in the list yet, it's almost certainly the staged rollout — capacity is being released in waves, so it may take a little time to appear on your account. Reload, or check back later in the day.
Confirm you're actually on it. The selected model name is shown above the composer and attached to each response. Before you trust a result to Fable 5, glance at the label — it's easy to assume you switched globally when you only switched one chat.
On mobile
Same idea, fewer clicks. In the Claude app for iOS or Android, tap the model name at the top of the conversation and choose Claude Fable 5. Your selection syncs with your account, so a model you picked on the web carries over — but double-check, because new chats can default back to the standard model.
In Claude Code and the API
If you drive Claude from the terminal with Claude Code, run /model and select Fable 5 from the menu (or pin it in your settings so every session starts on it). Note that Claude Code billed through a Pro/Max subscription is subject to the same June 23 cliff as the chat apps; Claude Code billed through the API is not.
On the API and consumption-based Enterprise plans, Fable 5 is fully available today with no rollout restrictions — you just pass the Fable 5 model identifier (published on Anthropic's models page) in your request. API pricing is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens — less than half the price of the earlier Mythos Preview, and the metric that matters once the free subscription window closes.
Team and Enterprise admins
On seat-based Team and Enterprise plans, Fable 5 is included for the window automatically — individual members select it from the picker exactly as above. If your members don't see it, two things to check: the staged rollout simply hasn't reached your workspace yet, or new-model availability is gated in your workspace's model settings. Because the rollout is capacity-driven, access can arrive unevenly across a large org.
What "usage credits" actually means after June 23
This is the part people will get caught by. On June 23, Fable 5 doesn't disappear — it stops being included. Continuing to use it draws from usage credits: pay-as-you-go balance on top of your subscription, billed against Fable 5's token pricing. If you have no credits and take no action, Claude simply falls back to your plan's standard models (Opus 4.8 and the rest) — your subscription keeps working, you're just not on Fable 5 anymore.
So the decision the free window is really there to help you make is: is Fable 5 worth paying credits for, for your work? The only way to answer that is to test it now while it costs nothing.
What to actually test in the free window
Don't waste the two weeks on toy prompts. Point Fable 5 at the things Anthropic is claiming it's exceptional at, using your own real tasks:
- Hard software work. Anthropic cites Stripe compressing "months of engineering into days" — a 50-million-line Ruby migration done in a day. Throw a genuinely gnarly refactor, migration, or multi-file change at it.
- Long-context + memory. With persistent memory, Fable 5 reportedly improved ~3x more than Opus 4.8 on long, stateful tasks (they benchmark it on Slay the Spire). Test it on a large codebase or a long-running research thread where context retention matters.
- Vision. It can rebuild a web app's source from a screenshot and pull precise numbers out of scientific charts. Feed it your dashboards, mockups, or figures.
- Knowledge work. It posted the top score on Hebbia's finance benchmark — document-heavy reasoning and chart interpretation. Give it your real reports and contracts.
One caveat to expect: Fable 5 ships with safeguards that redirect a small set of sensitive queries (cybersecurity, biology/chemistry, and model-distillation topics) to Claude Opus 4.8 instead. Anthropic says this triggers in fewer than 5% of sessions on average, so most users will never notice — but if a response feels like it came from a different model, that's likely why. (The unrestricted-in-certain-domains sibling, Claude Mythos 5, remains gated behind Project Glasswing and isn't part of this rollout.)
Bottom line
Switch it on from the model picker today, make it your default, and run your two or three hardest real tasks through it before June 23. The window is free, it may or may not be extended, and after it closes the same model costs credits. Two weeks is enough to find out whether Fable 5 earns a place in your workflow — but only if you start now.