Claude Fable 5 vs Gemma 4 12B
Pricing, benchmarks, and use case comparison
Quick take
- •Claude Fable 5 is meaningfully stronger at coding (99 vs 68 on our capability index).
- •Gemma 4 12B is meaningfully stronger at cost efficiency (92 vs 55).
- •Gemma 4 12B is open-weights (free to self-host); Claude Fable 5 is paid API only.
- •Claude Fable 5 has a 1M context window vs 256K tokens - better for whole-repo or long-document work.
Specs comparison
| Claude Fable 5 | Gemma 4 12B | |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | |
| Type | Closed source | Open source |
| Context window | ✓1M | 256K tokens |
| Input / 1M tokens | $10.00 | ✓Free (self-host) |
| Output / 1M tokens | $50.00 | Free (self-host) |
| Release date | 2026-06 | 2026-06 |
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Claude Fable 5 | Gemma 4 12B |
|---|---|---|
| SWE-bench Verified | 95.0% | - |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 | 88.0% | - |
| GPQA Diamond | 92.6% | - |
| SWE-bench Pro | 80.3% | - |
| Total parameters | - | ~11.95B |
| Context window | - | 256K tokens |
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 Gemma 4 12B if...
- →You need an open, self-hostable multimodal model
- →Running on a single consumer GPU or a laptop
- →Data-privacy or on-prem requirements
- →You want a permissive license (Apache 2.0) for commercial use