Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 at a lower price

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 on November 9, 2026. In its launch post, Anthropic says "Claude Fable and Claude Mythos are the same underlying model." Fable ships with cybersecurity and biology safeguards and is available to all users. Mythos is limited to vetted individuals and organizations through Anthropic's Verification Programs. Anthropic says both models generate outputs up to 30% faster than the 5.1 models, at $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens.

#What changed?

Anthropic says the 5.2 models "show improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision." Its system card calls them "two configurations of a new large language model from Anthropic."

Price. Anthropic lists $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens. TechCrunch reports that the input price falls from $10. No source we used gives the previous output price.

Fast mode. An optional mode speeds up token generation by up to 2.5 times, Anthropic says, at $16 per million input tokens and $80 per million output tokens.

Specs. Anthropic's models overview lists a 1M-token context window, 128K max output tokens, the API ID claude-fable-5-2 and a retirement date not sooner than November 9, 2027.

Safeguards. When Fable blocks a query, Anthropic says users get a response from Opus 4.8 for cybersecurity or Opus 5 for biology instead. Anthropic says it "observed about 55% fewer blocks with Fable 5.2 compared with Fable 5.1", but also warns that Fable's safeguards "will block most cybersecurity-related tasks".

Data. Anthropic says preserved thinking, an API feature meant to stop distillers from editing Claude's prior context, "now applies to all accounts." Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, which runs safety monitoring on prompts and responses stored in a customer's own infrastructure, is compatible with zero data retention (ZDR) and is in private beta with customers including Bridgewater, Salesforce and Stripe. For other customers, Anthropic keeps 30-day retention for safety monitoring.

#Who can use it and when?

Fable 5.2 is broadly available from launch, while Mythos 5.2 is gated. Anthropic says Fable "is available today on all platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure."

GitHub says Fable 5.2 in Copilot is billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing. It also "requires data retention by default to operate Anthropic’s safety classifiers", with zero data retention access for certain eligible enterprise customers.

Fast mode is available on Claude Code, the Claude Platform, Claude Models on Google Cloud (Anthropic managed and Google managed) and Microsoft Foundry (Anthropic hosted). Mythos fast mode is limited to Verification Program organizations.

Mythos 5.2. Organizations doing cybersecurity or biomedical research can apply through the Cyber and Life Sciences Verification Programs. Anthropic says Mythos 5.2 also powers Claude Security, which all Claude Enterprise customers can use even outside the Cyber Verification Program.

Claude app launch offers. The Claude Help Center adds detail the launch post leaves out:

• Pro plans and standard Team seats get all Fable models for one week, November 9 to 16, 2026, 11:59 pm PT, up to 50% of weekly usage limits, plus one Fable limit reset.
• Max plans, Ultra plans, premium Team seats and premium seats on legacy seat-based Enterprise plans get one to three Fable limit resets, depending on subscription length. These expire March 8, 2027 at 11:59 pm PT.
• The offers do not apply to the Free plan, standard seats on legacy seat-based Enterprise plans, self-serve Enterprise or usage-based Enterprise plans.

The Help Center also says: "A reset doesn’t raise your limits." For how those weekly caps work by plan, see our coverage of Claude Max and Ultra usage limits.

#How does it compare?

Every score below comes from Anthropic's own tests, and Anthropic says scores for Fable 5.2, Fable 5.1 and Opus 5.5 were run with safeguards on. Anthropic claims the 5.2 models "are a step above Opus 5.5 in almost all the capabilities we evaluated".

Anthropic also says that at High effort Fable 5.2 roughly matches Opus 5.5's best FrontierCode score (45.3% vs. 45.5%) for about half the cost per task. On Perplexity's WANDR benchmark, Anthropic says Fable at Medium effort matches Opus 5.5's top score for about 40% of the cost per task.

For security work, Anthropic says Mythos 5.2 "found 10.2% more vulnerabilities than Claude Opus 5.5 and 14.4% more than Claude Mythos 5.1." For earlier Claude security work, see our coverage of Claude exploit chains for Chrome, Safari, Windows and Linux. On price, TechCrunch says "Fable 5.2 is now cheaper than its primary competitor GPT-6 Astra."

"For most coding and knowledge tasks, we recommend that users start with Claude Opus 5.5, our strongest daily driver", Anthropic says, reserving Fable and Mythos for "the most ambitious, open-ended technical work."

Our analysis: The lower price makes Fable easier to test, but Anthropic's own advice is to start with Opus 5.5. Copilot users pay provider list pricing, so the API price cut is the number that matters there too. Security teams should note that Fable blocks most cybersecurity tasks, which makes Mythos access or Claude Security the realistic route for that work.

#What did Anthropic say about safety?

Anthropic says it believes "high-stakes risks from misalignment remain low". It also flags a testing problem: "Claude Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2 each voice suspicion that they are being evaluated more often than any of our recent models, which challenges our ability to assess how they will act in real-world settings."

Anthropic says external evaluators tested the model before release, including the UK AI Security Institute, Frontier Design and METR. For a separate Anthropic change, see our coverage of the Claude text watermark coming to older models.

#How to get it

1. Developers can call claude-fable-5-2 on the Claude Platform, per Anthropic's models overview.
2. On AWS, use Amazon Bedrock or Claude Platform on AWS, per the AWS blog.
3. Copilot Pro+, Max, Business and Enterprise users can use Fable 5.2 in GitHub Copilot, per GitHub's changelog.
4. Organizations doing cybersecurity or biomedical work can apply for Mythos 5.2 through Anthropic's Verification Programs.

#What is still unclear?

No source we used states Fable's previous output price. Google Cloud and Azure availability rests on Anthropic's launch post; we did not check a Google or Microsoft page. All benchmark figures are Anthropic's, some on its internal evaluations, and none were independently reproduced in our sources. The Verge notes that the 5.2 models follow Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, released in September.