Though it gets even more confusing because they also have effort levels so it’s not really possible to call one fast and one slow since Fable on Medium will be faster than Opus on Max.
I agree it’s confusing, and now OpenAI is following Anthropic’s lead with their new naming (Sol, Terra, Luna).
A similar complaint was valid years ago when OpenAI had GPT-4o, o1, o3 (but no o2), o4-mini-high, GPT-4, and GPT-4.1 and GPT-3.5 etc.
Arguably the complaint was more valid for those older GPT models you mentioned.
Some models like ViTs use something similar but then introduce words with no unambiguous order, like Small, Medium/Base, Large but then I always forget if Huge or Giant is larger.
Also fwiw I’ve never found LLM benchmarks to match reality based on my own usage, not for the large frontier models or smaller open weight models so who knows if Opus is actually better than Fable (I doubt it).
Fable 5.1 or whatever they go with will be the stronger version vs Opus 5.
From about 2 hours of Opus 5 use , I would say it is quite impressive.
> Suggestion for a better naming system: use the words "Pro", "Plus", etc.: Claude 5 Pro, Claude 5 Standard, Claude 5 Fast, Claude 5 Mini.
This is not possible: Standard (Free) / Pro / Max are plan names. Fast is a mode.
And fables are not particularly long actually.
And people know this? I didn't. I am not into music or poetry so these are not terms I am familiar with.
fable: 99/100 sonnet: 97/100 haiku: 91/100 opus: 89/100
So while these terms are almost universally known, opus is indeed the least known of the four. And I guess this only measures whether a person knows a word, not whether they know an opus is longer than a sonnet! Personally I only inferred that based on the related term 'magnum opus.'
1. Thinking on by default: On Claude Opus 4.8, requests without a thinking field run without thinking; on Claude Opus 5, the same requests run with adaptive thinking.
2. Disabling thinking is capped at high effort: You can still turn thinking off with thinking: {type: "disabled"}, but only at an effort level of high or below.
[1] https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/about-claude/models/migr...
Nice of them to be more explicit for what is blocked. Will be interesting to see if this is true or not.
Also, a notable lack of mention of open source models. They only compare themselves to ChatGPT.
In the next - please scan this totally mine code for vulnerabilities
Not that they should get credit for giving you only 50% of your plan worth of Fable usage but still.
I've never trusted on model cards though. I'm sorry.
why is that? its now being benchmaxxed too
From the system card [1]:
The Fable cyber classifier we have previously discussed also applies to Claude Opus 5 , with one notable exception: for Claude Opus 5 , we’ve unblocked vulnerability finding in source code to help our coding customers develop more secure code.
If you are a cyber defender and are experiencing blocks on Claude Opus 5 , we are also offering exemptions through our Cyber Verification Program, which will remove blocks to enable activities such as bug bounty hunting and vulnerability research and verification. Enterprise customers can also apply to join the Cyber Verification Program to have mitigations removed to enable penetration testing.
Annoyingly, this is a concrete argument that open source software may be easier to attack.