Anthropic's top AI model can't win users as cheaper rivals gain ground

Where Anthropic f'ed up was treating their monetization the way they treat model training. Turns out that success in experimentation is not transferrable.

They have tried to find the highest that the market pays for sota models; however, on the consumer side, this is just too confusing and unsettling:

"You can only use Fable for a week as a part of your plan"

"Be ready! You have to start paying per token!"

"Nevermind! we extended it for a couple more weeks"

"Wait, now it's up to half your usage"

"Ok, now its..."

Most people want to not care. We want our AI like electricity -- Kind of just there no matter how easy/hard is for the supply. You don't want your electricity company to be on the brink of cutting you off any second.

That's Anthropic. You don't feel they want to give you a dependable service for an, albeit premium, price. It's a constant bargaining game. That forces people to look beyond the walled garden. There, they find models that are fine... and without the shenanigans.

Non-LLM user here. Why? Apart from the ecological issues, I'm very uncomfortable giving my organisation's crown jewels to {random_internet__corp}. Look at the lengths they go to for training data - 10M for Spirit's call logs? Destroying millions of obscure books to scan them? They make meth-heads look scrupulous.

Your prompts, especially if they contain your entire codebase, are _way_ more data-rich than an airline phone call or 1920's novel. So they _are_ going to train on them, no matter how many checkboxes you tick to stop them. Which is both a commercial risk and a massive new attack surface.

It's not just software developers; if law firms aren't controlling any public LLM prompts _very_ carefully, they can expect some meaty client confidentiality suits. In fact any organisation in a competitive environment should be worried: Acme Bolts: "Write me a presentation for Zoom Construction". Beta Bolts: "Is Acme Bolts pitching to Zoom Construction?"

Maybe this is part of why OpenAI and Anthropic are finding demand softer than they would like. And why open-weight models that organisations can run on exclusive hardware are thriving.

They've put themselves in a corner. Fable was too good and they gave it away with the $20 plan. It had to be a big step from Opus 4.8 to show progress, and Opus 4.8 is GREAT at coding in many different domains.

But they're getting killed on token cost. They have to get people paying more for tokens. So then they put Fable in the $200 plan and release Opus 5. I'm suspicious of Opus 5. It is mostly worse than 4.8. It _seems_ like they nerfed it to create more distance between it and Fable.

So what have most of us done? Stayed on Opus 4.8. The statistics bear this out. 4.8 still dominates.

Now they're stuck. If they take 4.8 away, everyone will riot. If they make Opus 5.x better than 4.8, they disincentivize everyone from moving to Fable and most importantly, paying more.

Really, all they can do is take the L for now and just let 4.8 be the apex of the $20 pro plan for the foreseeable future while they work like hell to make Fable THAT much better that it earns the $200 to $infinity that they really want everyone to pay.

Wow the sentiment here is so negative.

I'm on the $200 plan (work pays) and I also have the $20 OpenAI plan (I pay) and keep a balance on OpenRouter.

There is nothing as good as Fable, not even close.

I recently had it run a 18 hour autonomous rebuild of a project (moving from Spark to Pandas for performance/data size trade off issues).

It orchestrated Opus sub-agents flawlessly for 18 hours. It even did a great job of managing the number of agents to keep them within the 5 hour budgets (I think I had to restart it twice).

After 18 hours I ran a /simplify, /code-review, /simplify cycle which went for another 6 hours.

2 billion tokens (mix of Opus and Fable), 24 hours of continuous coding and a bug free outcome. It would have cost $2000 at API prices and worth every cent.

Fable's ability to keep other models on track while working on these long horizon goals is so much better than anything else.

Far from neutered, I've never had a cyber refusal, and Fable's English is actually readable (unlike Opus 5).

As an aside: while I hate reading Opus 5 English it still is a noticeably better model than Sol in my experience.

But I could handle losing Opus5 is I got Sol instead. But there is nothing even close to Fable.

Mythos? That's only for super special corporations, you need not apply. Fable? Can't even look at it wrong without running into cybersecurity lockouts. And even if you get past this, it's limited to <50% usage. It took me a month to complete a Fable review on my project.

So stingy. Even with OpenAI's recent usage troubles, they're still so much better than Anthropic it's not even funny. Re-ran the code review with Sol as a benchmark and it turns out Sol's performance is within 70%-90% of Fable's. Anthropic's still got the best model, but what does it matter if I can barely use it?

For many coders including myself, LLM based coding agents work well enough to be useful, and in some cases worth paying for.

What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. There's no lint or compiler that can check for correctly constructed contracts. So LLMs, which should be useful to law firms, incur a lot more manual checking of their work than coding agents.

Less formal document production in other industries is likely to have less structure. That might not matter in some settings but I'm having trouble thinking of an example off the top of my head.

Transformer models are quickly becoming a commodity, and I suspect in time we'll all be running them locally. Even now, you can run something pretty useful on a 16 GB graphics card, and I suspect a decade into the future, entry level hardware will be running better models than high-end graphics cards can run now, as entry-level hardware gets better and models get more efficient.

It doesn't mean hosted frontier models wont exist, they'll just be rare. It's no different than any other commodity market, for example most cars are cheap commodity models, with rare individuals buying expensive luxury cars and businesses buying expensive trucks and specialized equipment.

My company still hasn’t been able to deploy wide access to Fable because it’s not available on a ZDR basis. This wasn’t mentioned in the article but I imagine this factor is not irrelevant.

Of course I echo the universal: Opus 5 sucks. But what also sucks is still using 4.8. Are you all seeing this? It's like the older models got dumber just before Fable and Opus 5 were coming out? I've heard the theory that it's because 4.8 is getting put on older hardware? And I imagine that just ratchets down reasoning time then possibly?

Sometimes I'm just trying to sus out if I'm truly seeing things these days or going a little nuts :)