Why Sakana's Fugu v1.1 beats Fable 5 without using it

sakana ai launched fugu ultra v1.1, an update to its ai router that dynamically routes queries to high-performance open-source models, claiming it beats anthropic's fable 5 on most benchmarks. the architecture achieves a 7.9 point performance boost on tests like programbench and terminalbench 2.1, even though fable 5 is excluded from the selection pool. available on openrouter and vercel, the service costs $5 and $30 per million input and output tokens respectively. success here validates open-source routing as a cost-effective, potentially superior alternative to proprietary apis, challenging the dominance of frontier labs.