Claude Fable 5 vs Gemma 3 4B

Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic's first generally available Mythos-class large language model, released on June 9, 2026. It is built for long-horizon, asynchronous, and agentic tasks that prior Claude generations could not sustain, including multi-day autonomous coding sessions, complex knowledge work, and document-heavy analysis. The model supports a 1 million token context window with up to 128,000 output tokens per request and uses adaptive thinking as its sole reasoning mode, where the effort level is adjustable but raw chain-of-thought is never returned. Vision capabilities allow the model to parse diagrams, charts, and tables embedded in files and PDFs, and to use visual feedback to evaluate its own coding outputs against design goals. On benchmarks such as SWE-Bench Pro, the model scores 80.3% compared to 69.2% for Claude Opus 4.8, and it leads on CursorBench 3.1 for autonomous coding workflows.

Claude Fable 5 shares the same underlying model weights as Claude Mythos 5, but is deployed with safety classifiers that automatically reroute queries in high-risk domains — including cybersecurity, biology, and chemistry — to Claude Opus 4.8. These classifiers trigger in fewer than 5% of sessions on average. As a designated Covered Model, all traffic is subject to mandatory 30-day data retention to support safety monitoring. The model is available via the Claude API, Amazon Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Anthropic has not publicly disclosed parameter count, architecture details, or training data composition for this model.

Gemma 3 4B, released on March 12, 2025, is the mid-sized member of Google DeepMind’s open-weight Gemma 3 family. With about 4 billion parameters, it is multimodal—supporting text and image inputs and generating text outputs. Like the larger Gemma 3 models, it features a 128,000-token input context window with an output capacity of ~8,192 tokens, enabling it to handle long documents and mixed text–image reasoning tasks.

The 4B variant is designed as a balance between efficiency and capability: it offers multilingual support across 140+ languages, strong summarization and reasoning performance, and compatibility with moderate hardware. Inference can run with ~6.4 GB VRAM in BF16, or significantly less in quantized 8-bit (~4.4 GB) or 4-bit (~3.4 GB) modes, making it accessible to developers outside large-scale infrastructure. While it lags behind the 12B and 27B versions on the most complex reasoning and multimodal benchmarks, its lower compute footprint makes it ideal for research, prototyping, and practical deployment where efficiency matters.