Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Fable 5 leads on 3 of 3 shared benchmarks, including SWE-bench Verified (95.0% vs ~85.2%), Terminal-Bench 2.1 (88.0% vs 80.4%).
- •Claude Sonnet 5 is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (85 vs 55).
- •Claude Sonnet 5 is 70% cheaper on input tokens, which compounds fast on high-volume or agentic workloads.
Specs comparison
| Claude Fable 5 | Claude Sonnet 5 | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Fable 5 | Claude Sonnet 5 |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | ✓95.0% | ~85.2% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | ✓88.0% | 80.4% |
| GPQA Diamond | 92.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | ✓80.3% | 63.2% |
| OSWorld-Verified | - | 81.2% |
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 5 if...
- →You want frontier-adjacent agentic coding but need better cost-efficiency than Opus
- →You are running high-volume agent loops and want strong reasoning per dollar
- →You are already on Sonnet 4.6 and want a same-price capability upgrade
- →You need a 1M context window with fast latency