Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Fable 5 leads on 1 of 1 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (95.0% vs 79.6%).
- •Claude Fable 5 is meaningfully stronger at math (96 vs 80 on our capability index).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (84 vs 55).
- •Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 70% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
Specs comparison
| Claude Fable 5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Anthropic |
| Type | Closed source | Closed source |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Input / 1M tokens | $10.00 | ✓$3.00 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $50.00 | $15.00 |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2026-02 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Fable 5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ✓95.0% | 79.6% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 88.0% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 92.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 80.3% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | - | 59.1% |
| OSWorld-Verified | - | 72.5% |
| GPQA | - | 79.7% |
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 Sonnet 4.6 if...
- →You have an existing integration pinned to Sonnet 4.6 and want stability
- →You need a proven mid-tier model with 1M context at $3/$15
- →You want predictable behavior without the new-tokenizer/thinking changes in Sonnet 5
- →You are cost-sensitive and don't need Sonnet 5's incremental gains