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How can it be legal to charge a higher fee for the Fable model, if most of the usage will default to a cheaper model behind the scenes?

It is one thing if I, as the user, choose to down-level but Claude shouldn't do this on its own.

They are transparent. Don’t use it if you don’t want to. These things shouldn’t be illegal.
Originally at least the switch wasn't silent and whether to halt or auto switch was a setting in Claude Code.
because it's all indistinguishable from magic when it's a cloud SaaS.

Not like you can tell the difference if you dont own any of the implementation.

Judging from their site, I think it should be OK:

"You won't be charged Fable prices for rerouted requests. Learn more about how the fallback experience works."

https://www.anthropic.com/claude/fable Under "Safeguards"

Using only Fable, if I do /usage it will show both Fable and Opus usage, so I don't think it's charging Fable prices for Opus code gen.
I must admit I was drawn to Claude because of their (obviously successful with me) publicity stunt about "being too dangerous to make widely available", when Mythos came out.

It's a shame because I was really looking forward to use it specifically to find potential security holes in my own software.

That being said, Opus 4.7/4.8 have been quite useful already, especially for finding things in the harder to test, non-happy paths.

If I recall, Fable 5 is supposed to be basically Mythos which falls back to Opus 4.8 when dealing with cybersecurity. I wonder if that also includes "finding bugs that could lead to security exploits".

If fable 5 can't do code... what are people using it for?
Is Opus 4.8 equally or more capabale for the actual mechanics of the coding work?

It seems to me that having a powerful Fable layer for the planning, coordination, orchestration-type work and delegating to a suitable model for the actual execution of "coding tasks" is perfectly appropriate, if that is the case.

Now that's what I call a scam.
Can't wait for China to pull ahead so we have an end to this bullshit
This is a testable claim.

Gave it a small coding challenge. It wrote the code just fine.

This third-party mirror won't load for me.

That aside, they said "some routine tasks like coding and debugging". Since I'm using it for coding right now and it's notably better than Opus 4.8, I think what they mean is that some coding and debugging tasks will fall back.

Fable is useless, then. What's the point of re-enabling it exactly?
This is a misinterpretation. Fable 5's acceptable use policy has false positives during some coding tasks, and that's what they were talking about. But I've been using it for web dev tasks since it relaunched today, and it's worked fine without fallback.

(On a firmware-customization project involving a ghidra MCP, it triggered and switched to Opus; that was sort of expected.)