· ai-devtools
Anthropic built a model that beats Opus. It recommends Opus anyway.
Anthropic just released a coding model that beats Opus 5.5 on two major benchmarks and can complete certain difficult tasks for half the cost.
Yet in its Fable 5.2 announcement on Monday, the company recommended that most developers stick with Opus, calling it the "strongest daily driver" for coding and knowledge work. "Based on capabilities and pricing, Claude Opus 5.5 is still our recommended model for most everyday work, from coding to knowledge work," Anthropic tells The New Stack. "Based on capabilities and pricing, Claude Opus 5.5 is still our recommended model for most everyday work, from coding to knowledge work."
Anthropic says Fable is intended for large software migrations, multi-agent builds and long-running research, but its performance data complicates the recommendation. The more expensive model can cost less to complete certain tasks, and the company's proposed multi-model architecture adds considerations around delegation, context management, and execution costs. When pricier runs cheaper On FrontierCode 2.0, Fable 5.2 at High effort scored 45.3%, nearly matching Opus 5.5's best result of 45.5%, while completing the benchmark tasks at around half the cost, according to Anthropic.
