Anthropic’s free access to Claude Fable 5 on paid plans expired July 19 at 11:59 PM PT.
It was the third extension in five weeks, and now the model runs on pricey credits.
A leaked model called “Honeycomb” has fans betting Opus 5 arrives this month.
The clock ran out last night. After stretching the deadline three times, Anthropic finally let free access to its most powerful model lapse. And the timing lines up with a mystery that has developers talking.
The End Of The Free Window
Claude Fable 5 is Anthropic’s flagship, the first model in its Mythos tier, built for long, complex tasks with a one-million-token context window. Since June, paid subscribers could use it for up to half their weekly limit at no extra cost.
That perk kept getting extended. The deadline moved from July 7, to July 12, to July 19. Each extension arrived right as the previous one expired.
Now it’s over. Here’s what changes from today:
Free included access ends for Pro, Max, Team, and premium Enterprise users
Fable 5 now draws from prepaid credits
Pricing: $10 per million input tokens, $50 per million output tokens
That output rate is double Claude Opus 4.8’s $25, the steepest Anthropic has listed
Users can switch to Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, or Haiku to stay within normal limits
Many read the repeated extensions as Anthropic spending compute to keep developers hooked on Fable 5 during the fiercest stretch of AI competition all year, rather than pushing them toward cheaper rivals.
The Honeycomb Mystery
Here’s the part fueling speculation. On July 8, an unreleased model called “Claude Honeycomb EAP” briefly appeared inside the Cursor coding tool.
It was described as an Anthropic research model with per-turn controls and safety fallbacks, a one-million-token context window, and an “extra high effort” setting. It vanished within hours, after just two prompts ran.
One detail spread fast: the model routed sensitive queries to Claude Opus 4.8 instead of answering them directly. The community theory hardened quickly, that Opus 5 could ship before the end of July.
A word of caution here. None of this is confirmed. Anthropic has not announced Opus 5, and the Honeycomb sighting is a leaked listing, not an official reveal. Treat it as speculation until Anthropic says otherwise.
Anthropic confirmed the Fable 5 extension through its official account:
https://x.com/claudeai/status/1944074996178862398
The company has said Fable 5 won’t leave subscriptions forever. It plans to restore included access once it has enough computing capacity to support it sustainably.
For now, if you lean on Fable 5 for heavy work, your bill starts today, unless you switch models or wait for whatever Anthropic ships next.
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