Claude Fable 5.1 vs Gemini 3.8 Flash

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.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is a natively multimodal reasoning model in Google's Gemini 3 series, positioned as the speed and cost oriented Flash tier while targeting long-horizon software engineering, autonomous agents, and enterprise workflows. It accepts text, images, video, audio, and PDF documents in a single request and returns text, with an input limit of 1,048,576 tokens and an output limit of 65,536 tokens. Thinking is configurable at low, medium, and high levels, and the model supports function calling, code execution, structured outputs, context caching, search and Maps grounding, file search, and computer use in preview. Image generation, audio generation, and the Live API are not supported.

On vision oriented evaluations the model reports 86.2% on CharXiv Reasoning for chart and figure synthesis and 87.8% on LVBench for long video understanding in agentic mode, alongside 90.8% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 61.6% on SWE-Bench Pro for coding. Following Gemini API conventions, it can localize objects by emitting bounding boxes as [ymin, xmin, ymax, xmax] integers normalized to a 0 to 1000 range, which supports prompt driven detection and grounding in addition to captioning, document parsing, and visual question answering. The knowledge cutoff is March 2026, though coverage in some domains reflects the January 2025 cutoff shared across the Gemini 3 family.