Why Anthropic is suddenly giving away Fable 5 for free for a year

anthropic extended free access to claude fable 5 for pro, team, and enterprise subscribers through july 2026, scrapping a planned pay-per-use switch. subscribers can use up to 50 percent of their weekly quota for fable 5, which typically consumes credits faster than other models. the decision is a direct response to openai's gpt-5.6 sol, which offers aggressive api pricing and free subscription access, pressuring anthropic to maintain value. with rivals like meta's spark 1.1 and grok 4.5 improving, top labs are sacrificing per-token revenue to keep users locked into their ecosystems.