Anthropic Releases Mythos, Fable Models; Cuts Pricing

Anthropic put out two new models on Monday, Mythos 5.2 and Fable 5.2, with the company touting gains in coding, reasoning and vision work, plus clearer communication with users. The pricing move is the headline for buyers: Fable drops from $10 to $8 per million input tokens, undercutting GPT-6 Astra, its main rival. Anthropic also says Fable 5.2 answers 30% faster across effort levels, with a pricier option for even faster inference. For enterprise customers, the bigger draw might be that Fable 5.2 now works with zero data retention policies through the company's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards system, a gap that's frustrated corporate clients for a while.

The timing matters. This is Anthropic's first model release since METR, a third-party evaluation group, published a report suggesting the company could be nearing recursive self-improvement, the point where AI systems start driving their own training progress. METR's numbers put Anthropic's internal AI-assisted development at roughly double normal speed, though the group flagged plenty of unresolved uncertainty in that estimate. Anthropic's own release notes admit the testing problem hasn't gotten any easier.