Claude Fable 5.2 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B
Claude Fable 5.2 averages 86.5% across five Vision Evals tasks and Gemma 4 26B A4B 54.1% across four (#2 and #54 of 67 models), so Claude Fable 5.2 leads overall.
- Claude Fable 5.2 wins all 4 tasks both ran, with its widest lead on counting (86.5% vs 43.2%).
- Gemma 4 26B A4B is under a tenth of the cost: $0.0019 vs $0.031 overall average cost per sample.
- Claude Fable 5.2 is faster: 9.3s vs 27.8s per sample.
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
Compare Claude Fable 5.2 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B live
Run the same image across every model that supports a task and compare their outputs side-by-side.
These models don't share enough common tasks for a side-by-side demo. See the comparison table below for their capabilities.
Claude Fable 5.2 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B on Vision Evals
Roboflow Vision Evals. Full breakdown below.
Claude Fable 5.2 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B Comparison Table
Evals updated November 10, 2026Pricing updated November 10, 2026
| Property | Claude Fable 5.2 | Gemma 4 26B A4B |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | Anthropic | |
| Category | closed | open |
| Modality | multimodal | multimodal |
| Release Date | Nov 2026 | Apr 2026 |
| Context Window | 1.0M | 256K |
| Parameters | Unknown | 25.2B |
| License | Proprietary | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | commercial use per vendor terms | free for commercial use |
| Pricing per 1M tokens | ||
| Input $/1M | $8.00 | $0.080 |
| Output $/1M | $40.00 | $0.100 |
| Vision Tasks | ||
| Captioning | Supported | Demo |
| Classification | Supported | Demo |
| Object Detection | Supported | Demo |
| OCR | Supported | Demo |
| Visual Question Answering | Supported | Demo |
| Model Features | ||
Both support 3 more features | ||
Vision Evalsground-truth scores across 5 vision tasks, pooled at low effort | ||
| Overall | 86.5% | 54.1%* |
| Quantizationsself-hosted | ||
| Avg cost / sample | $0.031 | $0.0019 |
| Avg speed / sample | 9.33s | 27.84s |
| By task | ||
| Object Detection (low) | 81.6% ±0.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 81.2 to 81.9 | 44.2% ±0.7, Mean of 3 runs, range 43.5 to 44.8 |
| Object Detection (high) | 83.3% ±0.5, Mean of 3 runs, range 82.8 to 83.7 | – |
| Counting (low) | 86.5% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 86.5 to 86.5 | 43.2% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 41.9 to 46.0 |
| Counting (high) | 92.8% ±1.4, Mean of 3 runs, range 91.9 to 94.6 | – |
| Identification (low) | 96.9% ±0.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 96.9 to 96.9 | 81.3% ±3.1, Mean of 3 runs, range 78.1 to 84.4 |
| Identification (high) | 94.8% ±1.6, Mean of 3 runs, range 93.8 to 96.9 | – |
| OCR (low) | 79.5% | – |
| by category |
| |
| OCR (high) | 84.8% | – |
| by category |
| |
| Reasoning (low) | 88.1% ±1.3, Mean of 3 runs, range 86.8 to 89.4 | 47.7% ±2.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 45.0 to 49.0 |
| Reasoning (high) | 92.0% ±1.0, Mean of 3 runs, range 91.4 to 93.4 | – |
Claude Fable 5.2 vs Gemma 4 26B A4B: Overview
Claude Fable 5.2 is a proprietary multimodal model from Anthropic, released on November 9, 2026. It accepts text and images and produces text, with a one million token context window and up to 128,000 output tokens. Adaptive thinking is always enabled, with an effort setting that controls reasoning. Anthropic positions Fable for demanding reasoning and long-running technical work, including coding and analysis of visual inputs.
Fable 5.2 succeeds Fable 5.1. Anthropic reports improvements in coding, reasoning, and vision, with output generation up to 30% faster than its predecessor. Fable and Mythos 5.2 share an underlying model, with additional cybersecurity and biology safeguards applied to Fable. Model weights are not publicly released.
Gemma 4 26B A4B is the Mixture-of-Experts variant in Google's Gemma 4 family, with 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token. Built from the same Gemini 3 research as the 31B dense sibling and released as open weights under the Apache 2.0 license, it supports a 256K token context window with text and image input and configurable thinking mode. The "A4B" in the name refers to its approximately 4B active parameters. The MoE design makes it significantly faster at inference than the dense 31B, running nearly as fast as a 4B-parameter model while delivering roughly 97% of the dense model's quality.
For vision tasks, the 26B A4B shares the same multimodal capabilities as the 31B image understanding with variable aspect ratios and resolutions, and structured bounding box output for UI element detection. The tradeoff versus the 31B dense model is a small quality reduction in exchange for much faster inference and lower hardware requirements, fitting in 18GB of VRAM at 4-bit quantization. It ranked #6 among open models on the Arena AI text leaderboard at launch.
Frequently Asked Questions
On Roboflow's Vision Evals, Claude Fable 5.2 performed better. It scores higher on all 4 vision tasks and averages 86.5% (#2 of 67) against 54.1% (#54 of 67) for Gemma 4 26B A4B. These scores measure vision capabilities only; either model may perform differently on work outside this benchmark's tasks.
Yes. On the Vision Evals Counting benchmark at low effort, Claude Fable 5.2 leads with 86.5% against 43.2%. This is the widest gap between the two models across the benchmark's tasks.
Gemma 4 26B A4B is cheaper to run. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals task mix it averaged $0.0019 per sample against $0.031. Actual costs depend on your image sizes, prompts, and output length.
Claude Fable 5.2 is faster. Across Roboflow's Vision Evals it averaged 9.3s per inference against 27.8s. Latency varies with image size, prompt length, and provider load, so treat these as relative rather than guaranteed figures.