Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6

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.

Claude Sonnet 4.6 is Anthropic's mid-tier large language model, released February 17, 2026, designed to balance performance, cost, and versatility for professional and developer use. It supports text and vision-based tasks with advanced reasoning, agentic capabilities, and Adaptive Thinking — a mode where the model dynamically scales its internal reasoning depth. A beta context window of up to 1,000,000 tokens (200K standard) enables processing of entire codebases or document collections in a single request. Parameters are undisclosed.

Optimized for coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, and knowledge work, Sonnet 4.6 delivers a full generational upgrade over Sonnet 4.5 and approaches Opus 4.5-level performance across many benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. It is the default model on Claude.ai, Claude Cowork, and is available via API and major cloud platforms — making it well suited for production workloads requiring strong reasoning without flagship pricing.