11 ms·

Anthropic's best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive

• herpdyderp 1mo ago
  Opus 5 is by far the best model for everything that matters to me. But it’s just too expensive. Terra 5.6 is bearable for everyday tasks, so now it’s my default.
• marsven_422 1mo ago
  [dead]
• pmontra 1mo ago
  http://archive.today/ZLojz http://archive.today/ZLojz
• verdverm 1mo ago
  I've always wondered why everyone flocks to SV's latest darling company. Have we not learned from our history of glorifying these SV darlings that turn hostile?
  • tyleo 1mo ago
    Are people flocking to them? I see people buy the products but if you ask I think they are just about as hated in the big techs.
  • Eufrat 1mo ago
    I think the glib answer is, “Greed blinds all”. Most of the people pushing this are just hoping that they can cash out before the hype pops and financial gravity crashes the party. Sam Altman recently claiming that the singularity is here is so stupid on its face he should just be treated as what he is, a huckster. None of this stuff ever made any sense on what it was being sold initially. It was always insulting that the media and business leaders tried to argue that the tech could replace entire call centers or vast swaths of entire industries. People keep arguing, but it will or it has based on extrapolating certain, reasonable use cases. Klarna has shut up about replacing call centers with bots because Markov chains with memory only can do so much.
  • dofm 1mo ago
    A mixture of opportunistic edge-seeking, FUD, FOMO, novelty-seeking, the need to impress shareholders, the tendency of salespeople to believe other salespeople are telling the truth, the ever-present need to stay in front of relentless commodification, and pragmatic curiosity. TBH I don't think any of that is unique to the IT industry's relationship with the Valley. Other technology-driven industries have a similar worship-ish relationship with a few rarified businesses. But the culture of the IPO exit accelerates all the most short-term motivations to do anything.
  • brookst 1mo ago
    Some of us want to get work done and don’t feel the need to either glorify or hypothesize about what might happen. I’m happy with Claude. If they become (bigger) jerks, I’ll switch to something else. I don’t ha e the energy to praise Anthropic today and I won’t have the energy to demonize them tomorrow. The emotional investment people have for/against these companies feels like celebrating or being offended by the weather.
• sajithdilshan 1mo ago
  Every software engineer in my company uses Claude code heavily. However we’ve never enabled Fable and only use Opus, Sonnet and Haiku. Nobody has complained and seems like for every use case we have Opus is more than powerful enough, especially with Opus 5
  • preommr 1mo ago
    > Every software engineer in my company uses Claude code heavily. I find it funny how OpenAI got caught lacking for a very brief window, but it turned out to be a very critical turning point. Like a guy that that's at the top of their game the entire year, and the one day they have the flu, the CEO does a surprise performance review.
    • sajithdilshan 1mo ago
      Yes, the critical point was end of last year, beginning of this year. Especially around the time Opus was released.
    • dominotw 1mo ago
      i think they were trying to play a different game.
  • dham 1mo ago
    A model is just another thing to plugin to a harness. I don't give it much more thought than that. If developers are still caught up on Claude Code, or Codex that's just not a long term thing. It's best to develop workflows locally and in the cloud with open harnesses. I know this will be the future because that's how it worked on every other system that developers use. Sure there are Microslop and Oracle db users but most of the world we live in is Postgres and Linux. That's why I think most companies will run llm's like that.
    • sajithdilshan 1mo ago
      That’s not true. Before AI, I have been using Jetbrains IDEs as far as I can remember. Also have been using MacBooks for work since my first job. You don’t have to generalise everything. If a particular specialised tool is good at its job just use it instead of re-inventing the wheel
• felixgallo 1mo ago
  [flagged]
  • tyleo 1mo ago
    I almost feel like there's some sort of paid campaign going on in Hacker News promoting the Chinese/open models. I feel like every day I'm hearing about how the frontier labs are dead but your experience is the same as mine. My company pays for Claude AND Codex but we never really use the open models for anything critical.
    • dgellow 1mo ago
      Doesn’t matter if your company pays for Claude, Anthropic and OpenAI valuations and expenditures commitment requires them to win the vast majority of the market to make economical sense. And the Chinese competition makes that very unlikely, to say the least. They likely won’t disappear fully but their “free” lunch as the AI darlings is done, on paper. Will be interesting to see how they adapt
    • felixgallo 1mo ago
      [flagged]
      • hgoel 1mo ago
        "Everyone that disagrees with me is astroturfing" is not going to lead you to being in touch with reality.
        • paulddraper 1mo ago
          [flagged]
      • codexon 1mo ago
        I'm not a biochemist and I have been blocked by fable and opus for "cyber" just for doing things like asking it to ssh into one of my servers, look at a CVE, or do work in assembly. Been rejected to their cyber verification program 3 times already.
• ieie3366 1mo ago
  Fable is not a tool for the average user. It’s a professional tool for highly complex work. I would compare it to a extremely high end $15k PC, or an expensive pro-grade video camera, or a freight train, or a … I would say at least 95% of the global population will not encounter a situation once in their life where it would be actually useful/warranted.
  • tcp_handshaker 1mo ago
    You have a $3 trillion bubble riding on this not being true.
    • jamiek88 1mo ago
      Right? If we’ve already reached ‘good enough’ then there’s rough waters ahead.
      • Yizahi 1mo ago
        I have a sneaking suspicion that someone at Google may be making the same bet, looking at the faster and faster Flash models which provide acceptable results to a lot of people (outside of coding).
      • deadbabe 1mo ago
        For Anthropic. But not for the AI industry at large. Cheaper, more powerful AI will continue to expand the bubble. Projects will get more ambitious. Everyone will build out their own custom little software. Code diversity expands and requires even more AI.
        • byzantinegene 1mo ago
          most of the bubble right now is fueled from circular financing of Anthropic and OpenAI
          • deadbabe 1mo ago
• tcp_handshaker 1mo ago
  "Almost Nobody Is Using Anthropic’s Fable 5" - https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/almost-nobody-is-using-anthropics-fable-5 https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/almost-nobody-is-u...
  • DangitBobby 1mo ago
    I'd use it if I could get through a 5 hour session without exhaustion my usage limit.
• YuechenLi 1mo ago
  Fable is just way too expensive and limited compared to GPT 5.6 Sol, and the only task that requires that level of intelligence is frontier scientific research. I use GPT/Codex primarily for coding and usually keep Claude on Sonnet 5 most of the time as I use Claude primarily to debug/brainstorm/make frontends as a supplement to GPT.
  • hellisothers 1mo ago
    I thought Sol was on par with Opus, so comparing it to Fable is apples and (very expensive) oranges?
    • rybosworld 1mo ago
      I've used all three extensively. Most of the benchmarks have exceeded their usefulness. Opus 5 beats fable 5 on many of them. Anyone who has used both models will notice immediately that this doesn't translate to the real world. Opus 5 is nothing short of a regression from Opus 4.8. Fable is genuinely a great model so long as you don't trigger a guard rail and it downgrades. Sol in my experience isn't significantly different than fable ignoring that Sol burns usage 10x faster but the end result is hard to differentiate. GLM 5.3 is a hair behind these two. An anecdote but not an original one from the people I talk to.
    • YuechenLi 1mo ago
      Yeah, it's pretty much apples to oranges, and I don't consider GPT and Claude to be interchangeable at all. From my anecdotal experience, GPTs generally codes more creatively and verbosely but Claudes tend to code more carefully and precisely, so the result is that GPTs generally finds more creative solutions to problems but also writes buggier code, which is why I converged on the setup of GPT/Codex for implementation and Claude for debugging, which feels more like a force multiplier than using each model individually.
    • rafaelmn 1mo ago
      Sol routinely catches stuff in review that fable misses for me. It's impossible to compare them meaningfully because it's a complete dice roll - but in practice using both in my projects I can get work done with both, and Opus 5 is far more tedious. But Fable security false positives and pricing just make it not worth compared to Sol IMO.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• bellowsgulch 1mo ago
  Reads like: brilliant Carnegie Mellon University computer science grad struggles to find job where he is not replaced by cheap, inferior Indian labor that still gets the job done, even if it takes marginally longer. No shit we're all paying 清冲 Flash to do the grunt work. Turns out though, paying 清冲 Flash a few more cents does exactly what Ivy Wasp Pro Mythical does. Crazy how that works.
  • phyrex 1mo ago
    清冲 is "Qing chong", pronounced "Ching Chong". It's not a real word, it's just racist.
• bentt 1mo ago
  They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains. But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable. So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates. Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more. Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.
  • GPerson 1mo ago
    Fable is still on the $100 plan for me. (Maybe this is A/B testing or something.)
    • rafaelmn 1mo ago
      Might as well not be - I routinely get rate limited in a single review session. I've honestly stopped using CC and moved to codex. Sol has it's warts but I've never once hit limits on a 100€ and I get a similar level of performance for what I'm doing. I wouldn't mind bumping Fable to 200$ plan if it was actually better but between the insane caps, reverting to opus/sonnet randomly and having similar perf as OAI - I'm done with it. Next step is to put 100$ into open router and try some western hosted open models with Pi when OAI starts pulling up prices.
      • almog 1mo ago
        What do you mean by "review session"?
        • rafaelmn 1mo ago
• throwaway63467 1mo ago
  Yeah I mean if I run out of tokens every couple of hours and have to pause my work or shell out more money I’ll switch to other tools that don’t have this problem. Though they turned this down a bit it seems, I can work with Fable reasonably now and I enjoy it actually. I think they were just testing out how much they can raise the cost without users leaving when having the best model. I guess not much after all!
• jeffnash 1mo ago
  Hasn't it always been the premise that intelligence would get cheaper? To me, on the enterprise side, it seems like firms are finally getting the memo that, whether you are locked into the Ant/OAI ecosystem or not, you don't need the smartest, most expensive model to do every single task. This is a good thing for overall adoption. Whether that trickles down into regular user behavior, especially with subscription pricing, remains to be seen; even though I intellectually know I don't need Sol for a simple refactor, I am sometimes hesitant to choose Luna/Terra, as it's hard to accept using something positioned, even implicitly, as 'worse'. Remembering that the smaller models tend to be faster is what usually pushes me over the edge. Anthropic in particular is much more compute-constrained than OpenAI and SpaceXAI and has relied on partnerships to provide inference. This reality factors into their pricing and usage limits (they started 'adjusting' the 5-hour limits during peak hours, and it certainly wasn't an upward adjustment). Accordingly, this is presumably what Anthropic wants, given they develop and release the lower-end models, suggest users use them in various nudges within their product, position the bigger/more expensive models as "For the most complex tasks" in their UIs, and so on.
  • margorczynski 1mo ago
    > whether you are locked into the Ant/OAI ecosystem or not I think the problem (for Ant/OAI) is that there is no sensible lockin or moat. LLMs are essentially interchangeable and stuff like a harness doesn't offer enough value on its own for someone to be locked into using one of them. Now with the onslaught of the Chinese models that offer almost the same quality for much less money they have a very serious problem on how to proceed. Investors now might be looking through rose tinted glasses but their patience has its limits.
    • jeffnash 1mo ago
      Agreed 100% for the consumer case: an empty chatbox is just about the least sticky surface I could ever imagine. I saw a mobile interstitial ad for Kimi recently whose hook was basically "Tired of paying for expensive ChatGPT? Download the Kimi app, it's the same thing but cheaper". I myself bounce between token subscriptions like no one's business and use Pi/OMP for maximum model flexibility when coding (and it's a few env variables or lines of (TO|YA)ML|JSON to switch providers in Codex, Grok Build, CC). I even self-host and try to use OpenWebUI + CLIProxyAPI when I can for all my chats. Enterprise is a whole different ballgame IMO with countless technical, compliance, and employee adoption considerations that add friction to switching. It's also where both Anthropic and (as of last week) OpenAI get the bulk of their revenue, and, incidentally, the venue where US Government regulations on Chinese models would have the most impact.
• hbarka 1mo ago
  Anthropic’s issue is churn because of the peak verbosity vomit coming out of Opus 5/Mythos/Fable. What the hell did they train it on. The sane model is still Opus 4.6.
  • dude250711 1mo ago
    Perhaps there is a sophisticated subtle poisoning attack that makes models behave like that?
  • paulddraper 1mo ago
    https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058 https://x.com/wolframs91/status/2090159644849353058 What if: - Opus 4.6 was the last Opus generation that got a lot of use by Anthropic's own employees - After that they primarily used Mythos internally - 4.7, 4.8 and 5 were RLAIFd by Mythos "teachers" - Hence why 4.6 is the last Opus gen who doesn't report back like a robot wanting to cover every potential hole another AI system would've spotted and criticized - Hence why coding style in Opus 5 also gets criticized, not only behavior in CC
    • bitexploder 1mo ago
      Commented elsewhere, I still use Opus 4.6 because it is the only model that feels decent to interact with. 4.8 is decent and some times smarter but you can see it trending towards Opus 5 levels of nonsense. I use Opus 5 when I don't need to interact. Fable or Opus 4.6 are the only Anthropic models I like interacting with ATM.
    • nl 1mo ago
      I've retweeted and posted this here before too. I think there is probably some truth to it. Worth noting that Fable (ie, Mythos) is actually nice to interact with.
  • ericol 1mo ago
    There's actually a tool called vomit [1] of all names to fix exactly what what is being discussed here. [1] https://github.com/zachahn/vomit https://github.com/zachahn/vomit
• websimapi 1mo ago
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• lnenad 1mo ago
  As a small background, I have a local server and I've been trying out different models with different inference engines, quants, configurations etc... I'm also using Opus and Sol at work consistently. I've used AI since the first wave, first as a toy, then as a highly specific tool, last 6+ months as the primary LoC generator. This is the first time I've felt, and I use the word *felt* since I don't have a suite of benchmarks or any sort of material approach towards comparing models, that Opus has declined in quality compared to before. Primarily I think its powers of deduction and understanding, even on xhigh, have become much worse. Before, being vague and providing a simple prompt would be enough, it could deduce and expand the details it needed, plus ask you clarifying questions, now this is no longer the case. A concrete, personal example, for a personal project, I've asked it to setup ssl over local IP. I didn't go into too much detail in the prompt as there are many approaches it could take and I didn't care too much to choose. It did horrible. The first thing it did was say the best lightweight approach is to add a reverse proxy. I'm like ok, makes sense. Then after asking it to proceed, it went and added a bunch of config to my golang service and didn't even setup a reverse proxy even when it said that is the way to go. It even said it didn't set it up lol. Then after I told it to do so it failed building the config in a way it was asked of it (support LAN IP and tailscale IP). Etc etc... When Fable came out it was huge, the benchmarks told the story, and the story mostly matched the experience. It felt, again, intentionally saying felt, like it was miles ahead. Now benchmarks say that there are many models that are close, but in actual use Fable still *feels* much better. I think benchmaxxing the new open weights models is ruining the value of benchmarks, if they ever had any. When you actually put them to the test you see 500k tokens of reasoning with "Actually..." and "Wait..." in every third paragraph of their reasoning trace. The price for Fable is definitely too much for any personal use now that it's no longer included in the subscription, and GLM 5.2, Deepseek Flash and Qwen 3.8 served locally or via cloud provide a lot, requiring a bit more babysitting though. Considering the price of Fable, my 5k USD Epyc server would pay itself off in less than a year if I used Fable or Opus in the same manner so at least for me the decision seems easy. And considering the point I'm poorly trying to make, that Opus doesn't feel like frontier anymore, this is probably the last month of my Claude subscription.
  • philipbjorge 1mo ago
    > When you actually put them to the test you see 500k tokens of reasoning with "Actually..." and "Wait..." in every third paragraph of their reasoning trace. I've wondered if this is part of why we don't see the reasoning traces for Anthropic's models before -- Open models might just be accurately surfacing how the sausage is made.
• rglover 1mo ago
  Karma backed over their dogma. I switched from Opus 4.7/4.8 to test Kimi K3 a few weeks back and the test hasn't finished; it's my daily driver now. Given their general behavior and preference toward social engineering to scare the shit out of normal people...this seems fitting.
• fxtentacle 1mo ago
  In my opinion, the big issue with Fable is that Claude Code cannot use it properly. I know, that sounds weird, but I've had Fable run down the wrong lane (and never stop) or give up and claim that something was impossible so many times (until I pointed at a GitHub repo that solves the "impossible" issue). But a while ago, I had access to a Fable harness that just never gives up. And that verifies itself. It burned $100 in API tokens in 15 minutes ... but it succeeded for all the prompts where Fable + Claude had failed. And I believe that's a real issue for Anthropic. Fable+Claude is not too expensive thanks to the subscription, but Claude severely nerfs Fable. To save money, I guess. Fable API + Custom Harness is a different class, it's so much better. But API tokens are so expensive, you're cheaper off hiring a freelancer.
  • ipnon 1mo ago
    It kind of has the personality of those students that get so stuck on one promising idea they lose sight of the problem.
• dlcarrier 1mo ago
  Transformer models are quickly becoming a commodity, and I suspect in time we'll all be running them locally. Even now, you can run something pretty useful on a 16 GB graphics card, and I suspect a decade into the future, entry level hardware will be running better models than high-end graphics cards can run now, as entry-level hardware gets better and models get more efficient. It doesn't mean hosted frontier models wont exist, they'll just be rare. It's no different than any other commodity market, for example most cars are cheap commodity models, with rare individuals buying expensive luxury cars and businesses buying expensive trucks and specialized equipment.
  • chr15m 1mo ago
    Yep local models will be good enough for most things you need to do, in the same way as most people need a laptop not a supercomputer.
    • DiscourseFan 1mo ago
      Well nobody thought you could write software that helps tightly coordinate processes happening simultaneously from millions upon millions of nodes on nearly every corner of the world, but here we are. When industry expands further off earth, we will need more complex and intricate software to coordinate its movements, why wouldn’t our systems become more powerful. If you are hopeful for humanity than you must expect the scale of industrial necessity to only ever increase alongside the imagination and capacity of its people’s.
      • gritzko 1mo ago
        Also, pairing a wireless mouse to a laptop is not getting easier as years pass.
        • dlcarrier 1mo ago
          That's a Bluetooth thing: https://xkcd.com/2055/ https://xkcd.com/2055/ My theory is that it's because the Bluetooth protocol is named in honor of the Viking king Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson, who conquered several disparate peoples into a single kingdom, so as an act of solidarity toward those peoples, the Bluetooth protocol is written in a way where a devices are as likely to rebel against consolidation as they are to pair together.
• exabrial 1mo ago
  Perhaps nerfing the cap out of your best model for press attention and hosting valuable features like thought traces isn’t such a great business model?
• ericol 1mo ago
  The problem is that they are not solving the problem they ought to be solving. I don't want Shakespeare, I want Bob the builder. Half of my work is telling claude how to behave. I'm pretty certain they have enough _data_ to realize people do the same thing time and time again. Check this comment of mine for a better explanation of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49413353
  • rowanG077 1mo ago
    This is really it for me as well. At the heights of complexity AI can do magical things. But really a lot of the time I just want it to do mundane things right. And currently it just cannot. It writes garbage text, consistently ignores something you have told it, makes mistakes a human makes once but the AI remains uncorrectable.
  • Bolwin 1mo ago
    They already do, extensively. Its not Shakespeare, in fact, it sucks at prose and creativity, like most newer llms. But people are not as alike as you think. I doubt I share your unique preferences. That said, I don't spend much time telling it how to behave. Are you sure you're not fighting the default system prompt?
    • ericol 1mo ago
      [dead]
  • Barrin92 1mo ago
    >Half of my work is telling claude how to behave Dijkstra in the Foolishness of Natural Language Programming [...] the "naturalness" with which we use our native tongues boils down to the ease with which we can use them for making statements the nonsense of which is not obvious. It may be illuminating to try to imagine what would have happened if, right from the start our native tongue would have been the only vehicle for the input into and the output from our information processing equipment. My considered guess is that history would, in a sense, have repeated itself, and that computer science would consist mainly of the indeed black art how to bootstrap from there to a sufficiently well-defined formal system. Imagine if only we had languages at our fingertips whose explicit purpose was to precisely and unambiguously tell a machine what to do! https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
• markbao 1mo ago
  I’m not sure if the underlying data is counting subscription use for Fable, which is where a lot of people are using it because token pricing is very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was counting enterprise token usage only. As rich as enterprise customers are, they’re not exactly willing to double the cost of SWE salaries on tokens. Either way, a model used to solve the top 10% of problems that people use AI to solve for, being used 10% of the time … seems like it’s in a decent place. I find Fable indispensable, and measurably better than alternative models, for complex feature development in an existing codebase. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen to nearly one-shotting features. Even still, I only use it for the hardest features and Opus 5 does a good enough job on the rest.
  • anon7000 1mo ago
    Yeah as soon as CFOs realized AI was racing to become one of the most expensive line items along with salaries and AWS bills, they started cracking down on the most expensive ones.
  • wj 1mo ago
    Very much agree on Fable. Over the past month or so it has shown to be the only Anthropic model that can understand a largish dbt model codebase. Opus 5 gets almost everything wrong. (High reasoning on both)
    • brianwawok 1mo ago
      Wouldn’t you need to bump opus reasoning a few levels to be apples to apples?
    • dmix 1mo ago
      More importantly other way cheaper models can do what Opus 5 does. So you can pay for Claude to use Fable 5 exclusively for harder stuff and planning, then get the same value you'd otherwise get from switching back to Opus by using other cheap LLMs for day-to-day coding tasks.
• effnorwood 1mo ago
  [dead]
• hmokiguess 1mo ago
  I guess soon they will see the full picture
  • dominotw 1mo ago
    the picture is now clear
• syntaxing 1mo ago
  GLM series has made it very practical to self host. If the new update for Deepseek flash holds up, I think it would be silly for some companies to not self host.
  • polski-g 1mo ago
    We're spending 225k a year on tokens. No reason not to buy the hardware necessary to run DS4 at this point.
    • syntaxing 1mo ago
      Agreed, and you can write cool infra agents to do stuff for you that runs during off hours like nightly tests and triage.
    • nicce 1mo ago
      Are you saying that you already spend so much money for tokens that too late to buy the hardware? Sounds like a trap...
• semiquaver 1mo ago
  My company still hasn’t been able to deploy wide access to Fable because it’s not available on a ZDR basis. This wasn’t mentioned in the article but I imagine this factor is not irrelevant.
  • Lucasoato 1mo ago
    Same for me, they’re not offering it with the same data residency features of Opus, many enterprise companies can’t accept compromises.
  • kwisatzh 1mo ago
    This is the biggest factor. FT (or the analysts it cites) fumbled the ball in this article.
    • janalsncm 1mo ago
      > Data retention rules imposed by the Trump administration have also hampered Fable’s adoption, according to Ara Kharazian, chief economist at Ramp. This is in the article.
      • semiquaver 1mo ago
        It’s far from clear to me that this is directly connected to the no-ZDR requirement. I’m heavily involved in this stuff with my company and I’ve never heard that the lack of ZDR fable is a Trump admin thing.
  • x3n0ph3n3 1mo ago
    The same for my organization. It's explicitly forbidden in my organization because it's not available with ZDR.
    • arlcode 1mo ago
      I get where it's coming from but I think it is also very funny if someone actually believes their claims (except as a CYA strategy) The AI companies have already shown how little they care about other peoples intellectual property and they won't care about their customers either if it stands between them and the promises they made to their investors.
• mupuff1234 1mo ago
  Which is why they are rushing to an IPO.
• mikert89 1mo ago
  im using fable almost exclusively, i just buy a new 200$ license if i run out of capacity. its so much better, easily worth it given how much work I get done. I built a code, deploy, e2e test loop with my full aws infra, fable just implements linear tasks constantly, 5 at a time, tests the whole thing end to end if people dont see why they need a model this smart, they probably arent using ai enough
  • HDBaseT 1mo ago
    People have realized you don't always need a Fable level model. Majority of my work is sufficient with ChatGPT Luna which has effectively unlimited usage on the $100 ChatGPT plan. I am not doing awfully complex tasks though. I imagine a lot of other people are in a similar boat, either switching from Claude to ChatGPT or even just min-maxing DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 or similar.
    • mikert89 1mo ago
      the code quality is higher though, so the value compounds. i dont need to watch as closely to what its doing, so its more autonomous
  • apt-apt-apt-apt 1mo ago
    Isn't there a risk of getting banned if you do this (multiple accounts to bypass usage limits)?
    • mikert89 1mo ago
      Idk I never worry about it
• Zigurd 1mo ago
  For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for. What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents. Less formal document production in other industries is likely to have less structure. That might not matter in some settings but I'm having trouble thinking of an example off the top of my head.
  • _joel 1mo ago
    > There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. There are definitely linters and this exists https://catala-lang.org/ https://catala-lang.org/
  • carlosjobim 1mo ago
    > What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. Translation between languages. That value dwarfs all programming value that can be had. Economically, culturally, scientifically, spiritually.
    • eikenberry 1mo ago
      But translations don't require anything close to SOTA level models. Translations will be high volume, low margin transactions. That will not save Anthropic.
      • carlosjobim 1mo ago
        Maybe not Anthropic, but LLM translations has a value counted in the trillions of dollars easily.
        • tock 1mo ago
          I see it's important but trillions? How did you quantify that number?
• sebastianconcpt 1mo ago
  The market correcting itself.
• a1371 1mo ago
  Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable. They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling: "You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan" "Be ready! You have to start paying per token!" "Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks" "Wait, now it's up to half your usage" "Ok, now its..." Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second. That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.
  • irishcoffee 1mo ago
    It’s almost like they’re trying to sell a solution looking for a problem! Startup lesson #1, don’t do that.
  • ls612 1mo ago
    The fact is that demand for tokens at electric bill rates so far outstrips what can be supplied currently not just with frontier models, but with open weights cheap models too. Running an always on Deepseek flash agent would cost three figures a month at API prices.
    • dannyw 1mo ago
      Total costs sure, electricity only costs no. My two DGX Sparks run DS4 Flash at about 50tok/s concurrency=1 which is more than suitable; at about 150W total wall power when generating. That’s about A$16 a month in electricity if I ran it 7x24x30.
  • fluidcruft 1mo ago
    Yeah, I agree with this. The constant state of "...will the rug be pulled?!?" does discourage relying on it as a model and building a workflow on it. Anthropic used to just be a reliable thing you could play with. Now it's this constant source of anxiety. It also didn't help that the government yanked it which adds another source of anxiety since OpenAI is on much better terms with the administration and the administration seems corrupt enough that they would mess with Anthropic if they got a big enough donation from OpenAI. But anyway after Sol entered the picture, I don't think Anthropic can get away with this as much and I also think they're going to face a massive backlash from Max subscribers if they do end up ending the +50% promotion at the end of the month because Sol is a Fable peer and priced very competitively.
• tschellenbach 1mo ago
  I see variations of this post all over X. Fable doesn't get much usage, since Opus 5 is like 99% as good at a lower price point. And perhaps more importantly also faster.
• Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
  "If not [bubble]... why bubble shaped?" lol =3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiYaWFP59Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTiYaWFP59Q
• x3n0ph3n3 1mo ago
  Anthropic's privacy deviation (ZDR) for Fable is why my organization forbids usage of Fable.
• kiratp 1mo ago
  The actual issue, is suspect, is that Anthropic won’t provide ZDR for Fable. Makes it a non started for a large percentage of businesses.
  • nullbio 1mo ago
    Yeah, and it's no secret why they won't. Your data is the only reason they even still provide subscriptions.
• Aeroi 1mo ago
  this article reads like a leak from a bank that didn't court the IPO. Anthropic is the fastest-growing software company in history. They have no issues "attracting users"
• CurbStomper 1mo ago
  [dead]
• apparent 1mo ago
  I have a $20/mo subscription and have found myself getting limited every few minutes of late. I'm just building a simple website, but after about 15-20 mins of back-and-forth, it tells me I'm tapped out for another 5 hours. This wouldn't be so bad if it didn't make mistakes periodically, especially when it's about to tap out. I get the sense that if I upgraded to the $200 subscription it would get me a lot more usage, but it would still run into these issues anytime I sat down to work for a few hours. I'm just using medium effort, so it's not like I'm on high all the time.
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• mrwh 1mo ago
  Are we at the stage yet where a super-strong model that needs oodles of safety protections to stop it outright hacking you is strictly worse for day-to-day tasks than a much cheaper model that's simply not competent enough to be dangerous?
• moralestapia 1mo ago
  Not just that but also Opus 5 is real trash. It's free for me (company pays) and I still prefer to use other models.
• matheusmoreira 1mo ago
  Mythos? That's only for super special corporations, you need not apply. Fable? Can't even look at it wrong without running into cybersecurity lockouts. And even if you get past this, it's limited to <50% usage. It took me a month to complete a Fable review on my project. So stingy. Even with OpenAI's recent usage troubles, they're still so much better than Anthropic it's not even funny. Re-ran the code review with Sol as a benchmark and it turns out Sol's performance is within 70%-90% of Fable's. Anthropic's still got the best model, but what does it matter if I can barely use it?
  • oefrha 1mo ago
    50% usage plus there seems to be a pretty big metering multiplier still. Do a relatively in-depth review of 3k LoC with Fable xhigh and poof, there goes 5% of the weekly Fable allowance. If I use their first party code-review skill that spawns a bunch of subagents—well just forget about it.
    • matheusmoreira 1mo ago
      I had Max 5x and every 5h window would bite off 10% of my weekly usage. Five Fable sessions per week.
  • fulafel 1mo ago
    Even if you get past these problems, those models are available only under the condition that Anthropic retains your data.
• atleastoptimal 1mo ago
  Like 90% of consumer AI use is stuff like "please write a summary of this PDF for me", or "Find a cheaper version of this product online", eventually the returns on model intelligence taper off for these kinds of tasks. However for the kind of frontier tasks they are testing the models on now, like math, science, etc. the marginal returns on increased intelligence are huge.
• runako 1mo ago
  The US government basically told them they can't sell "Fable" and so they aren't. That's probably 90% of the story. Once the government stepped in, their 5th generation was effectively killed. They either had to lock it up (Mythos), neuter it (Fable), or leave people with the perception they were overpaying for a weaker model (Opus 5). Hopefully Anthropic has learned to anticipate this risk and has a plan for rollout of their next model that plans for capricious ad-hoc regulation.
  • somenameforme 1mo ago
    What did they think was going to happen when they were actively doomsday fearmongering around the release of their own model? I assume somehow they thought this would lead to a moat with them being left safely inside the castle, but this response, and Reagan's 9 Words, were always infinitely more likely. It was a demonstration of a child-like level understanding of how regulatory capture works.
    • runako 1mo ago
      The PR from the US frontier labs has been poor to terrible from the beginning. Among other things, "we have stolen the collected works of your culture, now help us grow so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs" has to be one of the absolute worst marketing approaches in history.
      • rustcleaner 1mo ago
        >so that you can all lose your livelihoods and become our serfs Crimemaxxing about to go off the charts!
  • ComplexSystems 1mo ago
    The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care so much about this and they're right behind. I don't really know what the answer is.
• nrmitchi 1mo ago
  Anthropic's issues, as I see them, are: 1. They acted as if they were so far ahead capability wise that they could stop listening to their users. That is basically it. It is an extremely common belief that Opus 5 acts like a condescending wannabe-thought-leader, yet Anthropic's response to this is largely been "You're using it wrong. Try deleting all your config files". They released a "concise" output format, but pretty much swept it under the rug, despite it being one of the loudest complaints about their models. It also, generally, does not work as described. Not only did Opus 5 get much more difficult to work with, but it got, from a customer view, significantly slower. The token rate might be the same, but if every interaction takes 50% more tokens, it's 50% slower. All this time OpenAI has released a slew of new models, lowered the price on them (which, bluntly, 80% of user count don't actually care about since they're on subscriptions), increased subscription capacity, and increased response speed. It's not about cost. It's about Anthropic being the frontier-lab version of the marathon runner who decides to celebrate to early, and then loses the race.
• TechSquidTV 1mo ago
  I've been saying since the beginning. Models. are. WORTHLESS. If your company depends on having the best model, you have lost.
• cmiles8 1mo ago
  The foundation model companies can’t survive a token price war. If that’s where we’re heading get out your popcorn.
• sagex 1mo ago
  With open models delivering close to frontier level capability, I really don't see how these labs can only focus on having best model to sustain their business. Although these model's usage will grow, I think and hope that the serving will be distributed among many players.
• nate 1mo ago
  Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly? Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or going a little nuts :)
  • gandreani 1mo ago
    I'm not an expert by any means whatsoever but deploying models is not a straightforward task. There's a lot of levers to pull and I bet when models get "downgraded" to older hardware they do so WITHOUT the same stringent quality control of the output as they do when they release it. I don't think it's something deliberately malicious like planned obsolescence but it's more like startup culture of "just make it fit in this sprint".
    • Gareth321 1mo ago
      I attribute intent. These are for-profit companies with more leveraged capex than any other industry in history. They have enormous pressure to optimise their limited compute. Especially Anthropic, which is far more limited than OpenAI. Of course they're pulling those levers in the background to achieve "good enough." If they can reduce memory consumption by 20% and their metrics show a 4% loss of intelligence, they might very well pull that lever. These decisions compound. Your explanation is probably the most likely and largest contributor. Anthropic states that Opsu 5 is a "pinned snapshot". They claim the weights and model configuration are not silently updated, BUT the surrounding serving infrastructure can change, including the request router, safety classifiers, and sampling logic. Anthropic has stated that if behaviour unexpectedly changes on a stable model ID, an infrastructure update is the most likely cause. Further, "High" isn't a fixed amount of compute. Anthropic describes effort as a "behavioural signal" and not a token budget, with the model deciding how much thinking to do. So their "High" might be "Low" now, and we would never know. Finally, I strongly suspect some quantisation or KV-cache compression is happening. Anthropic doesn't clearly delineate whether this would fall under the pinned weights and configuration, or the infrastructure, which almost certainly guarantees it's the latter. Forgetting earlier information, poor retrieval of details, contradicting previous conclusions, hallucination, degraded instruction-following, and losing the thread during complicated tasks are all symptoms of quantisation and compression.
• mirekrusin 1mo ago
  Poor analysis. Fable is not used because it has extra retention requirement that corps can't sign off so it stays disabled for everybody in many cases. It's also not winning on day to day work against Opus 5, which is simply available as there are no extra retention requirements and no extra paper work to do with legal. Devs also don't like that Fable refuses to work on half of their prompts. Then comes better pricing and on-par capabilities from competition.
  • TylerE 1mo ago
    > It's also not winning on day to day work against Opus 5 In what universe? Hell, Opus 5 seems to be worse than Opus 4.6 at almost everything.
    • mirekrusin 1mo ago
      Sure.
• claudes_bussy 1mo ago
  I have 200MAX subscription for Anthropic and a RTX 5070TI 16gb GPU. I only use Claude.AI web chat and I only use Opus4.7. I build my prompts on prem with Qwen3.8:latest and copy paste them in claude.ai. I never type anything into claude.ai I am merely a copy pasting monkey. If I need to adjust something I do it from the the on prem prompt. I download code bundles from Claude.AI and push them to my git repo I host. I instruct claude to not do any testing and only let me do testing on my machine so i am not wasting claude resources. The point is to minimize the claude agents from doing anything but specifically doing coding. I can do this for 12 hours a day and reach about 80% of my weekly usage. Once I get to 3 hours left on my weekly I start a fresh chat session with Fable5 and have it do blind code reviews on everything. I only do this because I want to max out my weekly allotment and fable will get me to 20% in 3 hours on a 200MAX sub. Sometimes Fable5 does something interesting but for the most part my on prem static and dynamic code analysis have kept everything buttoned up.
• thelastgallon 1mo ago
  People understand the law of diminishing marginal returns.
• 1saadcodes 1mo ago
  Honestly, this makes a lot of sense to me. Devs that are good at their job don't need the absolute best model for every task, and if a cheaper model gets the job done 95% as well, it's a pretty easy choice
• throwaway613746 1mo ago
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• SomeHacker44 1mo ago
  I am getting close to dumping Anthropic. I like their models in general, but boy I have hit their "F you, I ain't gonna help" too many times now on innocent things. Ain't nobody wanna deal with that. I have never gotten that from Antigravity and if I did I woupd tey Codex then go to Openrouter and leave US models behind. I mean, who says "screw you" to requests to get 35+ year old vintage computers working? Claude, that is who. Its guard rails are so stupid. I hear people trying to do simple mailing list management hit it too. I am just about done with them.
  • jaykru 1mo ago
    GLM 5.3 will probably do your vintage computing work without fuss.
• rvz 1mo ago
  People here won't believe this, but Anthropic will begin to decline after their IPO when everyone runs to good enough cheaper models to save on token spend.
• latentsea 1mo ago
  Qwen3.8 is all you need.
• Metacelsus 1mo ago
  Well, as a biologist, Fable is still completely unusable
  • colingauvin 1mo ago
    I can't even ask it how to make toast without zeroing out all its memories of me.
• t1234s 1mo ago
  Do neoclouds win out in this scenario?
• segmondy 1mo ago
  Give me a break, Anthropic is expensive and their CEO is not the nicest guy around, and the games they play with other people's money/their API is not fair. I stopped using Anthropic and OpenAI once they started calling for regulation of open models. I have survived locally since LLama3-70 days and have been surviving fine. If I was to pay for cloud models, it definitely will not be Anthropic, Fable or not. From what I have read, the best AI model will not even comply with requests most of the time because it or/and Anthropic supposedly knows what's better and safe for you.
• fbrncci 1mo ago
  I have yet to even try Fable or Opus 5. Just looking at the hype they put out prior to the release, then the whole way of releasing these models as well as the pricing just puts me off to get used to it and then needing it. And this while so many good models came out without any hype, botched releases and significantly cheaper. Anthropic really shot themselves in the foot. I went from using sonnet and opus models for 50-60% of my daily token usage to 10-20%
• anonu 1mo ago
  so whats the best and most efficient coding harness and against which model? what are folks doing to keep costs low? I spent $1000 just this weekend on my personal projects for sota Claude but I feel like I can probably get much more juice if I start looking elsewhere. and resources or tech stack tips from HN?
  • ThunderSizzle 1mo ago
    Buy a card. Run your own. It'll be some time to optimize it, but an AMD R9700 is one of the cheapest by $/vram. Sadly, its been increasing in price slowly, and there seems to be some inventory issues, but I've switched to it exclusively. I hope to get a 2nd card to run other workloads simultaneously. I've been running Qwen27B Q6 with 130k context at 30tps. It's not bad. I think with an "autopilot" mode in pi, and sub agents to handle context window management better, I'd envision you could get close to unattended workflows. I haven't quite gotten that far though. Negative is you have to do it all, and the temptation to tinker is real.
• aurareturn 1mo ago
  On subscription plan. I only use Fable. It’s been my exclusive coding model since its release. I refuse to use anything else for coding. For AI agents, we have been mostly using GPT 5.6 Terra.
• a11r 1mo ago
  There is a difference between needing frontier capability because one is solving a truly open ended problem, and needing a reliable workhorse model to do something well understood. Local models (like Qwen 3.8 27B) have gotten so good that they can do all routine tasks at a fraction of the cost of frontier models.
  • pmdr 1mo ago
    That model costing $3/M output tokens on Openrouter is a mystery to me.
    • nicce 1mo ago
      32GB GPUs are getting expensive so that also affects the price.
      • pmdr 1mo ago
        I didn't think about GPU size. So they don't run this small model on B200s or something?
        • nicce 1mo ago
          This is open model intended for local usage. So, it doesn't matter. If the end user wants to run this on their own hardware, cost is defined by the electricity price + the price of the processing power. Providers can increase the price as long as the users don't switch for buying the hardware themselves instead.
• isolay 1mo ago
  What a shame, they cooked up all their marketing lies in vain.
• mattwad 1mo ago
  Claude will refuse to visit sites with robots.txt, make a graphic spoof of an iOS game, or even fill out an employee survey on my behalf. ChatGPT is always happy to oblige, no questions asked. I can respect the guardrails - I also can see why OpenAI may not have much control over their models - but I need an AI who will do whatever I ask and not play judge and jury.
• Taikhoom10 1mo ago
  [dead]
• Altaba 1mo ago
  [dead]
• sreekanth850 1mo ago
  It all started when OpenAI began focusing on Codex and coding while sunsetting Sora, which helped free up a lot of compute and resources. 5.6 was the final nail in the coffin.
• Frannky 1mo ago
  Omp + 0x alpha is free via openrouter and opencode go
• nl 1mo ago
  Wow the sentiment here is so negative. I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter. There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close. I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues). It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job of managing the number of agents to keep them within the 5 hour budgets (I think I had to restart it twice). After 18 hours I ran a /simplify, /code-review, /simplify cycle which went for another 6 hours. 2 billion tokens (mix of Opus and Fable), 24 hours of continuous coding and a bug free outcome. It would have cost $2000 at API prices and worth every cent. Fable's ability to keep other models on track while working on these long horizon goals is so much better than anything else. Far from neutered, I've never had a cyber refusal, and Fable's English is actually readable (unlike Opus 5). As an aside: while I hate reading Opus 5 English it still is a noticeably better model than Sol in my experience. But I could handle losing Opus5 is I got Sol instead. But there is nothing even close to Fable.
  • OrangeDelonge 1mo ago
    Did it take 18 hours because Fable is comically slow?
    • nl 1mo ago
      I think it's actually Opus 5 that is comically slow! And yes probably that was a factor. It was a lot of code too though.
  • yellow_lead 1mo ago
    > $200 plan (work pays) so violating the TOS? Or work pays for a plan you cannot use at work?
    • ec109685 1mo ago
      What part of the tos is violated?
    • jsisto 1mo ago
• deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
• foxylad 1mo ago
  Non-LLM user here. Why? Apart from the ecological issues, I'm very uncomfortable giving my organisation's crown jewels to {random_internet__corp}. Look at the lengths they go to for training data - 10M for Spirit's call logs? Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them? They make meth-heads look scrupulous. Your prompts, especially if they contain your entire codebase, are _way_ more data-rich than an airline phone call or 1920's novel. So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them. Which is both a commercial risk and a massive new attack surface. It's not just software developers; if law firms aren't controlling any public LLM prompts _very_ carefully, they can expect some meaty client confidentiality suits. In fact any organisation in a competitive environment should be worried: Acme Bolts: "Write me a presentation for Zoom Construction". Beta Bolts: "Is Acme Bolts pitching to Zoom Construction?" Maybe this is part of why OpenAI and Anthropic are finding demand softer than they would like. And why open-weight models that organisations can run on exclusive hardware are thriving.
  • musha68k 1mo ago
    "If You’re Paying for the Product, You Are the Product"
    • zombot 1mo ago
      > I guess Meta does have reasons to be quite jealous at this point. Yep, all they've got to train on are bot-generated Instagram posts. Can't say I pity them, though.
  • camkego 1mo ago
    > So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them. This is the part that is truly scary. Nadella the CEO of MSFT wrote that post “ A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable” It seems to me that the unspoken assumption in that post is that no matter what happens they’re gonna be training on your data. He’s the CEO of Microsoft, he knows how these decisions go down, he knows how the world works, he is sending a warning.
    • 1mo ago
• epsteingpt 1mo ago
  The rate of model improvement has slowed, and may not recover. It's unclear if Mythos2 or 3 or whatever they're calling their next model will be an improvement for most common enterprise use cases. LLMs can't solve basic things (writing non-slop documents, understanding context without massive handholding) and for coding other models are quickly becoming 'good enough' without the same cost and nannying. That's why Anthropic is 'stealing' workflows. But it turns out it's much harder to push adoption when your users don't really want to use your product. Code was a unique use case where the code luddites were loud but a minority - most people don't want to update 300 cases of variables across their code base for a name change. Most don't want to write unit tests. There are a few use cases where that will happen (law is next, maybe quant finance) - but otherwise most companies are throwing money into a pit and getting 0 return. It's a very interesting race and state of affairs, but Kimi K3 and likely the next DeepSeek models will put the high price token affair to rest. Unless of course, mythos / next model really does solve some universally applicable problem that people want it it to do.
• jatins 1mo ago
  For _most_ day to day knowledge work (writing, excel, filling forms, coding) current SOTA models are good enough. There are diminishing marginal returns from paying more in my opinion. If you are disproving Jacobian Conjecture it makes sense to be on SOTA, but for writing Golang and Typescript, faster sol/fable/opus class models are imo more likely to get user interest than the latest frontier.
• openamer 1mo ago
  Great find. Related: we are building OpenAmer, a fully open-source agent that controls the actual desktop (files, browser, terminal via CDP), has persistent memory and A2A multi-agent swarms. Apache 2.0, runs local on Windows: github.com/openamer/openamer
• Mistletoe 1mo ago
  If you are still investing in these companies or plan to in the IPO, the financial ruin you experience is your own doing, you are ignoring every sign that this isn’t going to work out. None of these numbers make sense and point to AI being a commodity with razor thin margins and a race to the bottom. Would you invest heavily in a toilet paper company that took massive amounts of power to produce each version that is 1% softer or stronger every six months?
• kollegekid 1mo ago
  This article totally misses the fact that fable is not ZDR!!! no serious large corporation can use it (or at least without a lengthy legal review)
• asimpleusecase 1mo ago
  Open router is the answer, get the intelligence you need and have the flexibility to not get trapped
• STELLANOVA 1mo ago
  We never got updated Haiku model and it's a shame. Not everyone and everything needs PHD level knowledge/reasoning, in fact it's really rare you need Fable level of knowledge/reasoning for vast majority of users...
• piker 1mo ago
  It does seem like diminishing (perceptual|valuable) returns to intelligence is antithetical to exponential capitalization growth. Even if we can get the models to Einstein level, maybe we just don’t need that to, say, mow the lawn.
• RayVR 1mo ago
  I’m constantly disappointed by Anthropic’s models. I become more disillusioned every day. It seems like, by having the models write Python code, they tend to write Python code like an average developer. Which is to say, quite bad. Add in the complete failure of the models to adhere to instructions in Claude.md, memory files, and added multiple times in prompts, I’m wasting huge amounts of time fixing bad design decisions that the model just slips in.
• madrox 1mo ago
  Anthropic lost all good will with me. Everything from their policies to their rhetoric has an air of "we don't trust you." The way they treated users who wanted to use them for OpenClaw didn't sit well with me, and then the Fable nonsense was the last straw. And they're somehow shocked users aren't loyal to that. It isn't about cost.
  • theshrike79 1mo ago
    Which AI companies still have your good will?
    • nullbio 1mo ago
      OpenAI is actually great from a users perspective. Responsive on Github issues, engage with the community, listen to feedback, constantly give subscription resets, fair subscription rates, speak out against fearmongering rhetoric, not cutting off your workflow mid task if your subscription runs out, and the list goes on.
    • madrox 1mo ago
      In addition to what another reply has said, I'll just say any company that does not make me feel like they'll ban me if I hold their model wrong. The bar is low.
• luciana1u 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• diogenescynic 1mo ago
  Markets been waiting for something to sell off or correct in the short term over. Looks like it may have found its justification.
  • diogenescynic 1mo ago
    Guess not! Markets shrugged it off.
• Aeolun 1mo ago
  More recently, after building something with direct chatgpt access I’m just baffled by the difference in speed between sol and opus. Opus hadn’t even finished making a plan, and sol was already done with executing. It’s like… Then on top of that opus slurps tokens like Anthropic is afraid they’re losing money. Read 200 lines of file, +20k tokens. Excuse me?
• 708145_ 1mo ago
  All of the version 5s have been truly disappointing. - Fable, nerfed or whatever, too expensive and not fully included in subscriptions. - Opus, neurotic (excessive) slop machine. - Sonnet, way too token hungry, cost much more than 4 series. Their almost daily outages does improve the experience. Anthropic really have messed up this year.
• ranang 1mo ago
  Until now, I've been paying Anthropic for the $200/month plan for over a year. This morning I was once again hit with "You've hit your monthly spend limit · your weekly limit resets 8pm […]". I am so frustrated and tired of being treated like a lab-rat to see how much I am willing to pay for less and less LLM access. I've now bought the $200/month plan from OpenAI and simply ran `/status` in Claude to get my session ID, then asked Codex in the same directory to "Please take over the work started by Claude Code with session ID `[…]`." This seems to work like a charm. It also seems that the Codex weekly and monthly budgets are more generous? Unless Anthropic adjusts their customer-abusing behavior I think I will end my subscription with them soon.
• cromka 1mo ago
  Paying 100 USD a month and getting "Claude is at capacity now" when you need it for work doesn't help. You can't make it an indispensable dev tool if devs cannot rely on it. They will absolutely jump the service to s more reliable one and that was Codex for me. P.S. Claude is indeed down right now for me.
• floki165 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• LoganDark 1mo ago
  It seems the people who aren't attracted to frontier models are the people who want to do the same they've always done, but just with new tools. I want to see what new things I can do, so of course I always want the latest and greatest. The stuff I've always done, I've already beaten to death.
• motbus3 1mo ago
  My first reaction to Fable was: "This is good for the bang" But as time passed the brittle software I noticed that without strict guidance it builds poor and brittle software. If I need to write all the specification so it follows it, I might just write the code or use a cheaper model. Opus 5 and Fable 5 have been quite disappointing. I used sol, terra and Luna and I think they and the first two are good for first code reviews. Luna is not much better than deepseek V4 flash
• dejan_ 1mo ago
  When I see a paywall it's always some scam. Always, both the article and the LLM.
• coachdaniel2026 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• tosh 1mo ago
  The chart ends in July, would be interesting how model adoption looks like in August Also Sonnet 5 was released June 30th, seems to be grouped in with 'other'? https://ramp.com/data/ai-index https://ramp.com/data/ai-index (click on model market share)
• t0bia_s 1mo ago
  Claude Opus 5 did plugin for Photoshop for $4.5 in three responses. DeepSeek v4 Pro did same for $1.7 in 7 responses (peak-off times). For doing much complex task, I would be super nervous about using Anthropics models.
• emsign 1mo ago
  When are the hyperscalers finally collapsing? I can't wait! I hate their hardware hogging and land grabbing so much. AI has to be local it makes no sense otherwise.
• jbverschoor 1mo ago
  It’s slow. Unbearably slow. Back to using a mixture of other tools. Did they not learn? Performance is a feature
• vikramkr 1mo ago
  "spending in fable 5 has plateaued" Bro if you want us to spend more on fable let us use our whole damn rate limit for it. Enterprise is a different ballgame obviously but for the subsidized Claude code users they literally cap it
• runtime_lens 1mo ago
  [dead]
• ThundeChile 1mo ago
  paywall.
• mpweiher 1mo ago
  This looks like strong evidence against the claim that local models will never be competitive, because hosted frontier lab models will always be better. The frontier models may be better, but who cares if the last generation of models are plenty good enough for what you want to actually do? And the best local models are quite competitive with those older lab models.
• jstummbillig 1mo ago
  The reading seems a little presumptuous to me. We do not know what Anthropic expected. This is mostly a matter of performance/cost and they clearly focused on building the Rolls Royce. How much adoption do you expect, when you build the Ferrari? And how many Rolls Royce can you even deliver? Saying "people are not buying that many Rolls Royce, instead they buy a lot of normal cars" is kind of duh. Anthropic is clearly still operating at inference capacity.
• cedws 1mo ago
  Huh? Fable is not benching as the "best" model anymore, that's probably why it has low usage. Opus 5 is supposedly the best one now, no?
• nullbio 1mo ago
  I've found myself using Kimi K3 API for things that ChatGPT is not good at (primarily AI research & development, because I swear they nerf their models for this - along with Anthropic), and I see absolutely zero reason to ever use Anthropic's APIs. The only reason I can tell they still have any form of momentum is because of sunk cost fallacy from the users who still use it.
• zkmon 1mo ago
  There is hardly any invention-based moat a startup can have these days, in this fully connected world. The only moat is laziness of people sticking to known products and solutions, real world assets that others can't replicate easily and ability to do some real world work.
• surume 1mo ago
  The reason I try not to pay for Anthropic is because half the engineering questions I ask get flagged as "too dangerous". Examples: spraying liquids at relatively low pressure, creating small AI models to detect objects via Raspberry Pi cameras, and calculating collisions between moving machine parts. Claude blocks me on almost EVERYTHING, even though the questions are completely valid science and engineering questions. I see NO REASON to pay for Claude when Kimi or GLM's quality it almost as good and I don't get rejected all the time for absolute nonsense. Anthropic is trying to be the uber-safe children's chemistry set where its ok if a kid drinks all of the chemicals in it while playing with it. That's not how you run a successful business. This is just the natural result.
• nik736 1mo ago
  For me Opus 5 was the nail in the coffin. Fable without the restrictions was a great model, but became unusable with the security guardrails. Opus 5 became so bad and slow it's unbearable. And since Fable falls back to Opus all the time it was time to switch. Me and my friends are calling it Slowpus by now... Up until some weeks ago Anthropic was the king, but we all switched to Grok 4.6. It became slow as well but is not down all the time, is a solid model and paired with another reviewer model it's a great daily driver.
  • Rover222 1mo ago
    Grok 4.6 is great
    • cheeze 1mo ago
      Similarly to the cars, I won't use it on moral grounds.
      • Rover222 1mo ago
        okay...
• alpaca9 1mo ago
  'People prefer models that are as good or better at a lower price, what a surprise!'
• hncbw02z5a 1mo ago
  Every word of this
• kibibu 1mo ago
  This isn't the reason I'm considering leaving Anthropic. I don't think I can tolerate its writing style anymore. Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm. I have tried many ways to get it to stop writing in its stupid punchy linked-in marketing-team voice, and I can't. Is there a model out there that sounds sound this awful? It's like rubbing sand into the folds of my brain.
  • chamomeal 1mo ago
    I don’t think GPT is any better. I swear GPT-3 was the golden area of LLM prose. With a good fine tuning, you really couldn’t tell that an AI was writing (except for when it would devolve into utter nonsense lol)
    • adam_arthur 1mo ago
      Codex (5.6 Sol) is extremely to the point and direct in its responses. Often I'll tell it to summarize what it said only because it's providing too much detail, not that it's using esoteric language or weird claudisms. No idea why people are still using Claude models. My impression is they started on Claude Code and never tried Codex or other harness+model combos
      • CodingJeebus 1mo ago
        I was on the Anthropic train for 2 years, and I tended not to jump between vendors much because it felt like a lot of distraction for little gain. But last week I switched to 5.6 Sol during an Anthropic outage and it made me realize how frustrated I was with Opus 5 and I haven't switched back.
      • kif 1mo ago
        That is true. On 5.6 I have noticed it to be a little bit more like Claude, which I dislike. But still way better than Claude.
    • amunozo 1mo ago
      I've read many people saying that the huge GPT-4.5 has the best prose of LLMs, but never actually tried it.
• wiredbox 1mo ago
  Fable stuggles to attract users because it's so bloody risk averse it's ridiculous. At a hint of something that it might interpret as a red flag (e.g. cyber) it will downgrade straight to Opus. As someone who's utilizing LLMs namely in the context of infosec, Fable has simply been unusable.
• Zigurd 1mo ago
  People promoting investment in AI are fooling you with bad TAM estimates. For example, if we valued every spreadsheet created using the same metrics of pre-automation paper spreadsheets, spreadsheets would be a $100 trillion business. Computing technologies are relentlessly deflationary. If the value of their TAM wasn't a fraction of a manual process they replace, they wouldn't have a productivity advantage. And the amount of TAM per unit often declines over the life of that product category. I would be unsurprised to find investment in data centers to be 10X what was really needed. The same goes for where the LLM S curve starts to flatten.
• 383848484848 1mo ago
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• 383848484848 1mo ago
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• Roark66 1mo ago
  You know what. As a big Anthropic fan that pays €120 a month for Claude Max x5 and maybe €30 a month for API access I got extremely annoyed at the extremely variable quality of service I'm getting. It is not only that every single turn with opus on high reasoning (high is the middle setting) takes at least 5-7min. It is barely usable interactively. Instead of a chat it feels like you're sending emails to it. Tasks that used to take an hour when it "reasoned" for 45s before it started doing anything now take almost entire day. At least until few weeks ago it was horribly, mind bogglingly slow (a little better during US nighttime), but the quality was still good. I could not do things interactively, but providing prompts were fine it built stuff fine. This is no longer the case. It makes stupid errors all the time. So you cannot leave it to complete some work, for example write infrastructure migration scripts a night before then you simply run the scripts and perform the migration during the day. Nope, every single script has stupid issues requiring use of the model to fix them. As they are written in it's own "spaghetti code" fixing them by hand is not an option. It is clear to me they are doing some shenanigans behind the scenes to try and optimise their compute use. Either they quantized these models dynamically or do other things that affect quality. In top of that they now do this stupid fingerprinting. Anyone who knows how output vectors are turned into tokens knows it will eat up a lot of compute or destroy quality.
• guluarte 1mo ago
  nobody in my company wants to use opus 5 and fable is too expensive
• VladVladikoff 1mo ago
  Anthropic killed it for me with all these silly security guardrails. As a programmer I use the models to check for vulnerabilities in my work. I also use the models for fun reverse engineering projects on the side. Neither of these activities are illegal. And I don’t appreciate being treated as a criminal. I asked Claude to do something the other day and it refused. I copied and pasted the exact same prompt into codex and it happily churned away at it for hours. What Anthropic has done to kill their own company is a bit sad.
  • browningstreet 1mo ago
    They're expecting to IPO bigger than SpaceX later this year. HN's take that they "kill their own company" seems wildly out of touch. Truth is, Sam and Dario and Elon are all terrible and so are their orgs. Leaving any one of those companies for any of the others is wild.
• dboreham 1mo ago
  Since this seems to be a thread for people to criticize Anthropic let me add my $0.02 that I'm a very happy customer and see none of the various terrible things everyone is complaining about. Except Fable refused to give me some flags for nmap. That was pretty annoying.
• bastawhiz 1mo ago
  This is maybe an unpopular take, but I don't think this matters for Anthropic. I don't think their immediate goal is to get users onto their biggest and best models. Sonnet is more than enough for many average users and their use cases. At this point, Fable is really just an experimental model (as it should be). It can do very useful things, but is it a broadly good general purpose model? Definitely no. Most users don't have problems hard enough for Fable outside of coding very large and complicated projects. Most users don't have 45 minutes to accomplish a task Sonnet can do well enough in five. There's not a PowerPoint in the world where Fable is the right tool to build it. The secret sauce is going to be in letting Sonnet decide to delegate to Opus and Fable when they're the right tools for the job. But you can't train a model to do that until the bigger/better models exist and you can observe how your users actually take advantage of them. I'd bet money that's exactly what the rlhf going on at Anthropic looks like right now. Economically, it makes sense. Sure, on paper you want users burning as many tokens as you can. But pushing users into burning tokens and taking a long time and getting a meh result is far worse then giving them the "fast and good enough" solution that occasionally burns more tokens automatically when the problem requires it, and getting a higher quality result out when you do. From an infrastructure capacity perspective, this is the dream: you stop measuring cost [for Anthropic] per token and measure cost per outcome, allowing you to use less hardware to accomplish the same abstract units of work.
• maverick98 1mo ago
  Personally I've been turned off by Anthropic's stance in many topics, regarding replacing software engineers and other professions, shady pricing, being on a high horse etc. In my work I use their models when I absolutely have to, otherwise I use cheap models to do my work.
• vonneumannstan 1mo ago
  Focusing on consumers is the wrong idea. They're a B2B company.
• Rover222 1mo ago
  My work pays for unlimited plans on whatever models we want, and GPT 5.6 sol has been the workhorse for weeks. Fable is still great, of course, but it's slow, wordy... I don't know. Sol is feeling like the leader at the moment. (coding web dev)
• stephencoyner 1mo ago
  I think it’s clear that most of their revenue is enterprise and enterprise demands zero data retention, which you can’t have with Fable currently. Non starter. This isn’t a price thing
• czhu12 1mo ago
  Its like the world speedran the problem with phones where at one point, annual upgrades really didn't make a difference between everything was so good already. At this point, every model writes code about as good as I'll need for the stuff that I'm working on, and with the right harness, I'm perfectly happy to let them cook, until it comes up with something working. Whether it takes 10 minutes or an hour really makes no difference to me.
• firemelt 1mo ago
  i hope they are collapse
• lenerdenator 1mo ago
  If I were an entrepreneur, I'd focus on getting a platform up that runs open Western models with good management and governance tools, and a decent coding agent front-end. The whole "we're going to replace all of your workers with an agent while also making AGI happen" thing was a bad idea in the first place; one that could not have gotten anywhere outside of Silicon Valley. People just want tools that they can deploy at scale, not to be your beta testers for the singularity.
• qwerty2020 1mo ago
  Not only is it incredibly expensive for the intelligence provided, it's slow, overly verbose, and outright refuses its users all the time. The level of general hassle with Anthropic nowadays is not worth it...not to mention Claude's infuriating dialect.
• iandanforth 1mo ago
  tldr: "Company's product is overpriced, market reacts normally."
• k8si 1mo ago
  Our org can't use Fable bc they require 7-day data retention to be turned on and my company won't do that. So it might have something to do with that rather than actual lack of demand.
• j45 1mo ago
  It's hard to trust if cloud providers will be available any given day, and the new angle of sanctions for new models seems to have people exploring alternatives.
• luciana1u 1mo ago
  [flagged]
• lbriner 1mo ago
  It's a bit of a non-headline. We are a period of massive up-take from people who aren't really familiar with what works well for their use-case and how much that costs. I have tried fable, gone back to sonnet, tried to use agent mode to mix and match and various other combinations. If I decide that Fable is the only one that can save me hours or days of time, I will go back to it and pay the cost. If the cheaper or free ones do well enough, I will stick with them. When you see the price of hardware needed for these models, we are generally not paying very much towards that price so I expect prices to start ramping up as the honeymoon ends and these companies' investors get itchy for their ROI.
• waffletower 1mo ago
  This article is a tiny bit deceptive -- it should read "struggles to attract API users". I imagine that subscription demand for Fable 5 is very high. But clearly Fable 5 is a much less attractive model for enterprise service use; you can clearly thank the Trump administration for some adoption hesitancy as continuity of service for Fable has been demonstrably insecure. We do not use Fable at the service level at our organization for several reasons: cost, service continuity, and data privacy. But we use Fable extensively for code development.
• chermi 1mo ago
  If they just told opus to stfu a large fraction of people wouldn't even consider leaving
• gwbas1c 1mo ago
  I just don't like Anthropic's 5.0 models. When I tried Fable and Opus 5.0, they were super-slow and gave me sub-par results. I went back to Opus 4.8, and then switched to GPT 5.6 Luna. It's cheaper and better than Fable. This is just a case of competition working: Fable (and Opus 5.0) just aren't as good as Anthropic believes, and there's no switching cost, so everyone's moving away.
• mtzaldo 1mo ago
  Asking for a Friend, what's the best subscription, from another ai vendor, similar to Claude Max+ allowance and models "intelligence" but cheaper? Thanks!
• kazinator 1mo ago
  Oh, no! Quick, build more data centers!
• tabs_or_spaces 1mo ago
  I started using llm's on a $20 claude license, then it became a $100 license. Then all the mythos warnings happened, then the fable access issues started. At that point, I just wanted to try something else because I didn't want to feel vendor locked by anthropic. Then I tried codex on the $100 plan. I've never been happier. It does everything claude can do, without any token limit issues or anything for me. I don't see myself going back to claude anytime soon. I also highly recommend folks to not vendor lock yourself to a model. You need to try multiple models for yourself and see what's possible. There should be zero loyalty to any frontier lab because of how fast things change and how volatile model access, uptime and customer experience can be with these things.
• ciefa 1mo ago
  I switched to GPT 5.6 Sol for the hardest tasks, the rest Qwen/Kimi/Deepseek can do. So far not looking back to Anthropic. They lost me.
• kittikitti 1mo ago
  Ive gave it a lot of thought, and what's happening is like what's happening with 4K streaming. It's not really 4K but no one cares. People don't have trained eyes and exaggerate their technical literacy. I also think that anti-intellectualism nullifies the benefits of the most intelligent AI models America has. No one knows the difference and they don't care.
• rldjbpin 1mo ago
  context: working in tech consulting with non-tech industry partners. outside of coding scenarios, anthropic is just not quite the best choice for regular folks. depending on the cloud/office stack used by the company, the userbase is better poised to use the native ai offering than moving to anthropic and connecting everything with them. same goes for third party guys trying to tie it all together. not to discount them or their features, but beyond small companies or startups, we don't see the same levels of adoptions now nor maybe in the near future. those asking us to build genai solutions for them also do not choose anthropic first over the main model offered by their current CSP. anthropic made itself available across the board finally, but it was already too late for most projects planned out for the upcoming quarters. also, we don't use the absolute biggest model nor instantly migrate to the latest one. the insane price jumps do not help with the same. especially when we quote something that may no longer be true down the line. aside: good luck to the FDE folks hired by the frontier labs. i wonder if they would really get to handle large company-wide projects in practice.