// head_to_head
Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Fable 5.1
Published LiveBench scores across all seven categories, live list pricing, context windows, and the measured cost of a point of capability — for both models, side by side.
Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 are close on both score and price.
Neither model separates itself on published score or list price. Pick on the things this table cannot measure: latency under your load, context window headroom, tool-calling reliability, and whichever provider you already have a contract with.
anthropic
Claude Fable 5
- Blended / 1M
- $20.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Jun 9, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.0
anthropic
Claude Fable 5.1
- Blended / 1M
- $20.00
- Context
- 1M
- Released
- Sep 1, 2026
- Overall score
- 83.4
Specs and pricing
| Metric | Claude Fable 5 | Claude Fable 5.1 |
|---|---|---|
| LiveBench overall Mean of the seven LiveBench category scores, 0–100. Higher is better. | 83.0 | 83.4 |
| Cost per point Measured benchmark spend divided by overall score — dollars per point of capability. | $0.7925 | $0.6668win |
| Blended price / 1M 3:1 input:output mix, the usual shape of production traffic. | $20.00 | $20.00 |
| Input price / 1M | $10.00 | $10.00 |
| Output price / 1M | $50.00 | $50.00 |
| Cached input / 1M Price of an input token served from the prompt cache, where the provider publishes one. | $1.00 | $0.250win |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Max output tokens | 128K | 128K |
Benchmarks by category
An overall score averages away the thing you probably care about. These are the seven LiveBench categories scored separately — Claude Fable 5 on top, Claude Fable 5.1 below, both out of 100.
What each one costs to run
Per-token prices are hard to feel. These are monthly list costs for both models across five workload shapes, using each provider's published cached-input rate where there is one.
| Workload | Claude Fable 5 | Claude Fable 5.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot 1.2K in / 400 out × 200K requests | $5752.00/mo | $5698.00/mo |
| RAG assistant 8K in / 600 out × 100K requests | $7400.00/mo | $7100.00/mo |
| Coding agent 40K in / 4K out × 20K requests | $6960.00/mo | $6540.00/mo |
| Document extraction 20K in / 1.5K out × 50K requests | $13,300/mo | $13,263/mo |
| Bulk classification 500 in / 20 out × 5M requests | $25,500/mo | $25,125/mo |
Which should you pick?
You are running this at volume
Claude Fable 5.1
Lowest measured cost per point of capability at $0.6668 per point — the gap compounds with every request.
The workload is coding or agentic work
Claude Fable 5.1
Leads on agentic coding — 66.1 against 62.2.
Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Fable 5.1 FAQ
Which is better, Claude Fable 5 or Claude Fable 5.1?
Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 are close on both score and price. Neither model separates itself on published score or list price. Pick on the things this table cannot measure: latency under your load, context window headroom, tool-calling reliability, and whichever provider you already have a contract with.
Is Claude Fable 5 cheaper than Claude Fable 5.1?
They cost about the same. Both land near $20.00 per million tokens on a 3:1 input:output blend, so price is unlikely to be the deciding factor between them.
Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Fable 5.1: which scores higher on benchmarks?
Claude Fable 5 scores 83.0 and Claude Fable 5.1 scores 83.4 overall on LiveBench, the mean of its seven categories. That gap is inside the range that effort settings alone move a score, so treat them as equivalent on published quality. Category scores differ from the overall figure — a model can lead on reasoning and trail on coding, which the per-category table above breaks out.
Which gives better value for money, Claude Fable 5 or Claude Fable 5.1?
Claude Fable 5.1. Cost per point divides the measured dollars LiveBench spent running the benchmark by the score it earned, so it captures something token pricing misses: a reasoning model can emit many times more tokens than its per-token rate suggests. Claude Fable 5 works out at $0.7925 per point and Claude Fable 5.1 at $0.6668.
Does Claude Fable 5 or Claude Fable 5.1 have a bigger context window?
They are effectively the same — 1M for Claude Fable 5 and 1M for Claude Fable 5.1.
Do Claude Fable 5 and Claude Fable 5.1 support prompt caching?
Both publish a cached-input rate: $1.00 per million for Claude Fable 5 and $0.250 for Claude Fable 5.1, against full input rates of $10.00 and $10.00. On a workload with a long stable prefix — a system prompt, a tool schema, a retrieved corpus — that changes the economics more than the headline price does.
Related comparisons
How these numbers are produced
- Price — provider list price from OpenRouter, refreshed every 15 minutes. “Blended” is a 3:1 input:output mix.
- Scores — LiveBench release 2026-06-25, using their own category map. Each model shows its strongest published run. A blank means “not evaluated”, never “bad”.
- Cost per point — the measured dollars LiveBench spent on the run, divided by the score it earned.
- “Win” — awarded only past a threshold: one full point on a benchmark score, 10% on a price, 25% on a context window. Anything tighter reports as a tie, because effort settings alone move a LiveBench score by more than that.
Published benchmarks rank models on someone else's tasks. Before committing, see LLM & agent evaluation for building an eval on your own.