Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Opus 4.8
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Fable 5 leads on 3 of 4 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (95.0% vs 88.6%), Terminal-Bench 2.1 (88.0% vs 74.6%).
- •Claude Opus 4.8 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (70 vs 55).
- •Claude Opus 4.8 is 50% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
Specs comparison
| Claude Fable 5 | Claude Opus 4.8 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $10.00 | ✓$5.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $50.00 | $25.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2026-05 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Fable 5 | Claude Opus 4.8 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ✓95.0% | 88.6% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | ✓88.0% | 74.6% |
| GPQA Diamond | 92.6% | ✓93.6% |
| SWE-bench Pro | ✓80.3% | 69.2% |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index | - | 61.4 |
Scores sourced from official provider release posts and independent benchmark aggregators.
Which should you choose?
Choose Claude Fable 5 if...
- →You need the absolute highest capability Anthropic offers for hard tasks
- →You run long, complex autonomous agents where quality compounds over many steps
- →You do frontier-level engineering, research, or analytics and cost is secondary
- →You want maximum accuracy on the toughest coding and reasoning benchmarks
Choose Claude Opus 4.8 if...
- →You need top-tier autonomous coding and multi-step agentic reliability
- →You run long-horizon agent traces that previously derailed after compaction
- →You want enterprise-grade reasoning with 1M context and 128k output
- →You need throughput and are willing to pay fast-mode premium for 2.5x speed