For twelve days, Anthropic is letting paying Claude users run the most powerful model it has ever shipped to the public at no extra charge. The same model was switched off by order of the United States (US) government less than a month ago. Now it anchors a giveaway whose deadline just moved: access was set to end July 7, and Anthropic quietly extended it through 11:59:59 PM Pacific Time (PT) on July 12, 2026.
That is the headline. The fine print is where the word “free” starts doing a lot of quiet work, and it is worth reading before you cancel anything else you pay for.
What “Included” Actually Means
Start with who this is for. Fable 5 is included at no extra cost only on the Pro, Max, Team, and premium Enterprise plans; the Free plan is excluded entirely. If you are not already paying Anthropic, there is nothing here for you.
Even on a paid plan, the meter is running. Anthropic lets you spend “up to 50% of your weekly subscription limits on Claude Fable 5” during the promotion. The other half of your allowance still has to cover everything else you do with Claude. And the frontier model is thirsty: in Anthropic’s own words, “Fable 5 draws from your plan’s regular weekly usage limit and uses it faster than other Claude models.” Translation: the same subscription that comfortably runs a week of ordinary work can burn through its Fable budget in a fraction of the time.
You can reach it almost everywhere Claude lives: the web app, mobile, desktop, Claude Code, Cowork, Design, and the Microsoft 365 and Teams integrations. Pick “Fable 5” from the model selector and it is yours until the window closes.
The Model You’re Test-Driving
This is not a minor upgrade dangled as bait. Anthropic bills Fable 5 as its “most capable widely released model, built for the most demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work.” It ships with a 1-million-token context window by default and can return up to 128,000 tokens in a single response.
The number that explains the giveaway is the price tag. Through the Application Programming Interface (API), Fable 5 costs $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens. That makes it Anthropic’s most expensive widely available model, which is exactly why half of your weekly plan spent on Fable 5 carries real dollar value. A consumer subscription aimed at a model that bills $50 per million output tokens is the kind of math that only survives inside a time-limited promotion.
What Happens When the Window Closes
After July 12, the model does not vanish, but the arithmetic changes. Fable 5 leaves the flat subscription allowance and moves to metered usage credits, billed at the same $10 / $50 per-million rate as the API , or you switch back to another Claude model. That is the switch originally scheduled for July 7, before Anthropic extended the window to July 12. API access, for developers building on Fable 5, was never part of the promotion and is billed separately at standard rates the entire time.
Why It Was Gone for Three Weeks
The strangest thing about a promotional window for Fable 5 is that, a month ago, nobody could use it at all.
Fable 5 became generally available on June 9. Three days later, a US government export-control directive forced Anthropic to switch it off for every customer worldwide, a saga covered in detail in Fable 5’s three-day life and the 5:21pm letter that ended it. It then stayed dark for roughly 19 days. On June 30 the government lifted the controls , and Anthropic redeployed Fable 5 on July 1.
It did not come back unchanged. To satisfy the government, Anthropic trained a new safety classifier that blocks the specific jailbreak technique flagged in an Amazon security report “in over 99% of cases,” reroutes any blocked request to the older Claude Opus 4.8, and opened a HackerOne channel for researchers to report new bypasses. The promotion, then, doubles as a victory lap: proof the model is back, wrapped in an offer built to get as many people using it as fast as possible before the discount ends.
What to Do Before July 12
If you already pay for Claude, the move is simple. Select Fable 5, throw your hardest reasoning and coding work at it, and find out where it genuinely beats the model you normally reach for, while the price of finding out is still buried in a subscription you already bought. Spend the first half of your weekly allowance deliberately, because the second half is not coming back at the same price. And if you are on the Free plan, this particular door was never open, extension or not.
The deadline has already moved once. Anthropic has not promised it will move again.
🦋 Discussion on Bluesky
Discuss on Bluesky