Claude Opus 4 vs Claude Fable 5.1

Claude 4 Opus, released by Anthropic in May 2025, is the flagship model of the Claude 4 family, built for complex, long-horizon reasoning and advanced coding workflows. It is multimodal, supporting text (including voice), images, and tool use, and operates as a hybrid reasoning model—able to deliver quick answers in fast mode or switch to extended thinking for deeper, multi-step problem solving. With a ~200,000-token context window and a training cutoff around March 2025, it is optimized for handling large documents, long conversations, and sophisticated agentic tasks.

Positioned at the high end of Anthropic’s offerings, Opus 4 achieves state-of-the-art results on coding benchmarks like SWE-Bench (72.5%) and Terminal-Bench (43.2%). It is best suited for research, enterprise automation, and software development at scale. The model is classified at Anthropic’s ASL-3 safety level, denoting advanced oversight and safety features.

Claude Fable 5.1 is a proprietary multimodal model from Anthropic in the Mythos-class tier of the Claude 5 family, positioned above Claude Opus for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work. It accepts text and images as input and returns text, with a one million token context window and a maximum output of 128 thousand tokens. Adaptive thinking is always on, and an effort parameter controls how much reasoning the model applies to a given request. Anthropic reports a reliable knowledge and training data cutoff of June 2026. Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 share the same underlying model; the difference between them is the set of safety classifiers applied to dual-use cybersecurity and biology requests.

On the vision side, Anthropic documents improvements in reading dense charts, financial filings, and tables nested inside PDF documents, which extends the model toward document understanding, chart question answering, and spreadsheet and slide work. Reported evaluations cover agentic scientific research on Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1, agentic coding on Terminal-Bench 4.0, computer use on OSWorld 2.0, and multidisciplinary reasoning on Humanity's Last Exam. Model weights are not published.