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Dubbed Fable 5, the model is the first from the Mythos class – Anthropic’s most advanced lineup of AI technology, unveiled in April but restricted over cybersecurity concerns – to be made widely available.
Anthropic says Fable 5 is exceptionally good at writing and debugging software code, answering complex research questions and analysing images.
In parallel, Anthropic is offering an unrestricted version, Claude Mythos 5, to companies and organisations that already have access to this model family – including cybersecurity partners enrolled in its Project Glasswing programme.
That select group was expanded in early June to around 200 organisations in more than 15 countries and is expected to grow further.
When Project Glasswing launched, some critics accused Anthropic of overhyping the threat so as to generate attention.
But companies that have tested Mythos have since endorsed its capabilities, with the US Government – which had been in a legal dispute with Anthropic – eventually testing the model over security concerns.
The White House has since set up an arrangement to test the most powerful models from the leading AI companies before they are released.
Anthropic says the restrictions on Fable 5 will work like this: most queries to it relating to sensitive issues like cybersecurity will be routed instead to the lower-tier model, Opus 4.8, which was made public in late May.
Anthropic hired outside experts to spend more than 1000 hours trying to find ways to bypass these restrictions – a process known as red-teaming.
The company also ran a bug bounty programme, which pays people to find security flaws. No one found a way to completely unlock the model, Anthropic said.
The security question, which Anthropic has made one of its main commercial arguments, had drawn the San Francisco startup into an unprecedented standoff with the Trump administration over its refusal to lift its restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons.
The launch of Fable 5 comes with a steep price tag – US$10 ($17) per million input tokens and US$50 per million output tokens, double the cost of Opus 4.8. Tokens are measures of usage of an AI model.
An intensive coding session by a programmer can burn through one million tokens in a matter of hours or less.
Despite exponential revenue growth, Anthropic remains far from profitability and is paying a premium for computing power. It recently began leasing a data centre from Elon Musk for US$1.25 billion per month.
These launches come amid intense financial excitement around AI.
– AFP