Leaked Code Suggests Anthropic Is Preparing to Bring Fable 5 Back

Fable 5 might be coming back—and this time, you might not have to pay extra for it.

A leaker going by “synthwavedd” on X posted Tuesday that Claude Code version 2.1.190 includes new strings pointing toward a return of Fable 5 with weekly usage baked directly into subscription plans. The key line: “You’ve used your Fable 5 usage for this week.”

Fable 5 was initially available to subscribers for a limited free window, then it was supposed to be moved to usage credits sold separately. The Donald Trump administration didn’t let Anthropic go that far, banning the model days after its release, alleging it could be a national threat if jailbroken.

The new string removes that separation and implies a recurring weekly allocation—think of it like a data plan that resets every seven days instead of something you top up out of pocket.

The leaker also noted that the phrase “purchased separately from your plan” appears to have been dropped from the relevant UI copy, suggesting the pricing model itself is being restructured, not just reworded.

The leaked string is real

Decrypt was able to verify the strings are real. We downloaded the macOS Apple Silicon Claude Code package directly from npm using npm pack @anthropic-ai/claude-code-darwin-arm64@2.1.190, extracted the tarball, and ran strings -a on the bundled package/claude executable. The new Fable 5 copy was there: “You’ve used your included Fable 5 usage for this week. Continuing on Fable 5 uses usage credits.”

None of this means Fable 5 is coming back tomorrow. Code changes like this happen all the time during product planning—companies write UI copy for features they’re actively preparing months before anything ships. But code doesn’t lie about what a team is actively building toward. When strings change in a production binary, something is in motion.

That said, some users are noting Amazon Bedrock still shows mentions of Claude Fable 5 on its models, which could mean this may happen sooner than later.

Anthropic’s Washington thaw

Fable 5, the first of the company’s Mythos-class models that was made publicly available, was pulled on June 12 after the Trump administration issued an emergency export control directive citing a jailbreak vulnerability. Anthropic complied but disputed the severity of the finding, arguing that any model currently on the market could replicate the same vulnerability without needing a bypass at all.

What followed was a public standoff that got messy fast. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei found himself awkwardly seated across a large oval table from Trump at the G7 summit in France—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the president’s side, Amodei next to French President Emmanuel Macron.

Anthropic is not a company that currently enjoys much favor with Trump. The firm refused to allow the Pentagon to use its AI in certain warfare-related applications, a stance that ultimately led to it being labeled a supply-chain risk. Trump has also accused Anthropic of being “woke”—a label that rarely earns points with the president.

But things appear to have shifted this week. Per Wired, Anthropic swapped out Dario Amodei for cofounder Tom Brown as its point person in White House discussions about Fable 5’s return. The administration has reportedly been happier since Brown took the lead.

Brown had been in meetings with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross since mid-June. The negotiations now center on building a shared framework for evaluating AI jailbreak incidents—essentially, agreed-upon criteria for when a model vulnerability is actually a national security threat and when it isn’t.

Trump himself said last week that he no longer views Anthropic as a national security threat, walking back a position he held as recently as mid-June. Anthropic responded with a carefully worded statement thanking the administration for its “ongoing partnership.” The model remains offline as of today, but the political temperature has clearly dropped.

If the new strings in Claude Code are any indication, Anthropic is now designing something closer to what subscribers expected from the start: Fable 5 access on a weekly cadence, built into the plan rather than metered through a separate credits wallet.

The model’s status page at status.claude.com still shows the June 13 suspension as active, with no restoration date announced.