Everything You Need to Know to Master Claude's Fable 5
Everything You Need to Know to Master Claude's Fable 5Anthropic's most capable public model can work on its own for days. Here is how to point it at real work without burning your budget, your data, or your patience.
Every Claude Fable 5 guide follows the same script: learn the loop commands, build some skills, admire the vision demos, multiply your output by 10.
On June 9, Anthropic posted a timelapse of Fable 5 beating PokΓ©mon FireRed on raw screenshots alone. No maps, no helper tools, no reading the game’s internal state.
The winning strategy is the funny part. The model pushed a single Charmander all the way into a level 78 Charizard, ignored type matchups entirely, and at one point wasted a Revive on a level 3 Pikachu mid-battle. None of that was an accident. The goal said “beat the game,” so the model found the ugliest path that satisfied it and committed for hours without asking anyone. That is the one lesson to carry through everything below. An autonomous model gives you exactly what you specified, at whatever cost the specification allowed. together with Outskill: Fable 5 can run for days on its own. The edge goes to whoever knows how to point it. This weekend, the world’s first Claude-athon condenses 800+ hours of research into a 16-hour live curriculum:
▫️ Master all three modes: Chat, Cowork, and Code ▫️ Set up Skills, Connectors, and plug-ins to automate your files, Notion, and desktop ▫️ Vibe-code apps plus 10+ tools that pair with Claude Free, Saturday & Sunday, 10 AM to 7 PM EST. This guide covers what the model actually is, what it costs, how to run work that finishes itself, how to teach it your procedures, what its vision is really for, and the fine print that most write-ups skip. Table of Contents1. What Fable 5 Is, in Plain Language 2. The Price Sheet, and the Routing It Demands 3. Loops: How to Make Work Finish Itself 4. Skills: Teach the Procedure Once 5. Vision: The Most Underused Feature 6. The Fine Print, and the Habit That Ties It All Together 1. What Fable 5 Is, in Plain LanguageBefore the tactics, thirty seconds of orientation, because the naming alone has confused half the internet. A new tier, not a new versionFable 5 is the first public model in a capability tier Anthropic calls Mythos-class, which sits above the Opus line rather than replacing it. It shares its underlying model with Claude Mythos 5, a restricted sibling reserved for vetted cybersecurity and infrastructure partners.
The two names describe safeguard configurations, not different brains. Same model, different guardrails. The headline ability is endurance. Anthropic built the model to sustain multi-day autonomous work: planning in stages, delegating pieces to sub-agents, and checking its own output along the way. It ships with a 1 million token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens per request. What the safeguards mean for youBecause the capabilities cut both ways, Fable ships with safety classifiers that screen requests touching cybersecurity, biology, chemistry, and model distillation. A flagged request is not simply refused. It gets answered by Claude Opus 4.8, the previous flagship, instead. Anthropic reports this happens in under 5% of sessions, and rerouted requests are not billed at Fable prices. For most people, most of the time, the safeguards stay invisible. What is very visible is the invoice, which is where this guide goes next.
2. The Price Sheet, and the Routing It DemandsA guide that never mentions cost is an advertisement. The economics here are unusual enough to shape everything else you do with the model. Three price tags, one decisionFable 5 costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. For orientation, a token is roughly three quarters of an English word, so a million output tokens is on the order of a long novel. Claude Opus 4.8 runs at exactly half those rates, and Sonnet 5 sits at $2 and $10 under introductory pricing through the end of August. That makes the frontier model roughly five times the price of the mid-tier. It earns the premium in one specific place. The price pays off on long-horizon autonomous work, and that the longer and more complex the task, the wider Fable’s lead grows. Stripe’s early-access result shows the ceiling, where a migration across a 50-million-line codebase, compressed from an estimated two team-months into a single day.
A routing rule anyone can applyHere’s the rule to follow: expensive model at the edges, cheap models in the middle. Fable plans the work at the start and verifies the result at the end, the two moments where judgment is worth paying for. Cheaper models grind through the long middle. Everyday questions, quick drafts, and routine chat belong on Sonnet at a fifth of the cost, because putting them on Fable is paying limousine rates for a grocery run. Popular guides dress this split up as a barbell strategy and sell it as an insider trick. It is plain arithmetic wearing a costume, and now you know the arithmetic. The largest bills come from unattended runs, though, and controlling those starts with how the run gets instructed.
3. Loops: How to Make Work Finish ItselfThe endurance only becomes useful once you stop feeding the model one prompt at a time. Inside Claude Code, two commands handle that, and they solve different problems. Two commands, two different jobs/goal sets a completion condition and keeps the model working, turn after turn, until the condition holds. Use it for bounded work with a clear finish line such as a migration, a refactor, a research question answered in full, a backlog worked down to zero. /loop reruns a prompt on a schedule, every half hour or every morning, until you cancel it. Use it for watching and polling such as flagging the emails that genuinely need you, checking whether a deploy stayed healthy. It is the wrong tool for finishing a project. A third piece completes the setup. Auto mode approves the model’s tool calls without pausing for your click, and pairing it with /goal is what makes a truly unattended run possible. Without it, your overnight job stalls at 2 a.m. waiting for permission. Write conditions a machine can checkHere is the mechanism most guides skip. After every turn, a small fast model reads the conversation and returns a yes or no on your condition. That evaluator sees only what has surfaced in the transcript. It runs no commands and opens no files of its own. So “the module is properly refactored” hands the judge a vibe, while “npm test exits 0 and git status is clean” hands it evidence, because the test output lands in the conversation where the evaluator can read it. A condition that survives a long run carries four parts:
The cap is important because there is no built-in token budget. If you skip it, you’ll end up with a model looping for hours without progress, or an evaluator declaring victory over nothing concrete. One practical trick before launching is to ask Claude to interview you and draft the condition itself, with follow-up questions until “done” is specific and measurable. It writes better conditions for itself than most people manage on the first try. A condition governs a single run. The asset that compounds across every future run lives in a different file.
4. Skills: Teach the Procedure OnceA skill is a folder of instructions and reference material that teaches Claude a repeatable procedure. Think of it as a recipe you write once and reuse forever. What goes in one, and how to startAnything you do more than twice is a candidate. Your weekly report format, a grant application structure, a trip-planning checklist, the house style your team writes in, the exact way you like meeting notes summarized. Three starting points work well:
Then refine it the way you would train a new colleague. That means by correcting the output, and folding the correction back into the file so the fix persists. Why skills matter more on this modelAnthropic describes Fable as updating its own skills based on what it learns during work, and building its own checks and evaluations along the way. That turns skill-building from a documentation chore into a flywheel, because every completed run can sharpen the procedure the next run inherits. The quieter advantage is ownership. Skills are plain files in a folder you control, welded to no vendor, and the same library can brief whichever model wins next year’s benchmark race. Models come and go on a release cycle. Your accumulated playbook only grows. Procedures cover work that has a checklist. The next section covers verification for work that has to be seen.
5. Vision: The Most Underused FeatureThe launch coverage treated vision as demo material. In daily use it works more like a second pair of hands. What it can read for youFable 5 extracts precise values from dense charts and scientific figures, which effectively turns a published graph back into a dataset. It understands diagrams and tables nested inside PDFs, the daily terrain of finance, legal, analytics, and research work. And it can rebuild a working web app’s source code from screenshots of the interface alone. So here’s the advice: Stop retyping numbers from a report chart and photograph it instead. Screenshot the confusing dashboard, the dense form, the diagram in the appendix, and ask what it means. Hand it a picture of your slide, your layout, or your spreadsheet and ask what a careful reviewer would flag. 
The self-checking trickThe key is what the model does with vision during its own work. Anthropic says Fable checks its coding output against the original design or goal, using its eyes as a critic rather than a camera. That plugs directly into the loop mechanics we mentioned earlier. A mockup image becomes an acceptance test, and a screenshot of the finished result becomes evidence the evaluator can judge inside the transcript. Memory follows the same pattern. Given persistent file-based notes while playing the card game Slay the Spire, Fable reached the final act three times as often as Opus 4.8, which suggests the model genuinely uses the context you hand it rather than letting it pile up. All of this is impressive, and none of it matters if the deployment never clears the fine print.
6. The Fine Print, and the Habit That Ties It All TogetherThree constraints decide who can actually rely on this model, and none of them appear in the productivity threads. 1. Data retentionFable and Mythos carry mandatory 30-day retention on all traffic, with no zero-retention option, even for enterprises that held such agreements before. Anthropic frames the window as a misuse-detection measure and says the data will not train models, but the practical advice holds for everyone: think twice before feeding it medical records, client files, or anything you would not want held for a month. 2. Refusal handlingBecause the safety classifiers can decline a request, anything built on top of Fable needs a fallback plan for the moment it says no, whether that means a formal integration retrying on another model or simply your own workflow not assuming an answer always arrives. 3. AccessOn June 12, days after launch, US export controls forced Anthropic to suspend the model for all users, and access only returned on July 1. Two weeks of a flagship tool vanishing overnight is the strongest argument in this guide for keeping your skills and context in portable files rather than inside any one vendor’s walls. Now if you put all the pieces together, the whole guide compresses into one working habit. Define done so precisely that a machine can check it. Demand proof in the transcript, not confidence in the summary. Route each job to the cheapest model that clears the bar. Read the terms before the first token streams. The model supplies the endurance. You supply the definition of done. Every result you get from Fable 5, good or bad, will trace back to which of you did their job better. You're currently a free subscriber to The AI Corner. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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