Simon Willison tests Claude Fable 5.1's pelican benchmark across five reasoning levels

Claude Fable 5.1 made me a nice animated pelican

Simon Willison ran his classic 'SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle' prompt against Claude Fable 5.1 at five reasoning levels. Low and medium produced near-identical outputs with no visible reasoning, taking ~23 seconds and ~10 cents. At xhigh the model spent 7m51s and $1.83, adding real detail. Max ran for 13m54s and $3.30, delivering his best Anthropic pelican yet—blue hat, basket with a fish, feet on pedals—though he still says it lacks the flair of Gemini 3.7 Flash. Separately, Fable 5.1 hit 52.6% on the new Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 benchmark, up from 24.7% for Fable 5.

Why it matters: Simon Willison ran a controlled five-tier reasoning comparison on Claude Fable 5.1 with concrete latency and cost numbers, making it more useful than the official announcement. Score stays below 85 because this is a personal evaluation rather than a major capability breakthrou...