Fable 5 is back, and there's a new Claude Sonnet 5

Fable is back

Anthropic re-released Fable 5 for paid users with stronger guardrails, available in subscriptions only through July 7 and capped at 50% of usage limits. Scale's benchmark shows it completes 16% of remote work tasks, double Opus 4.8. Claude Sonnet 5 also launched—benchmarked close to Opus 4.8 on agent tasks, cheaper per token but roughly the same cost per task in practice; the author finds it expensive and slow. Google dropped two new models: Nano Banana 2 Lite for fast, cheap images and Omni Flash for video generation and editing. Bridgewater and Thinking Machines trained a financial triage model hitting 84.7% accuracy at 13.8x lower cost than the best frontier model tested.

Why it matters: Anthropic dropped Fable 5's limited return and Sonnet 5 simultaneously — two signals stacked. Scale benchmark provides hard comparable numbers, not pure marketing. Fable 5's 16% task completion rate doubled but absolute number is still low, so not pushing past 90.