GoKawiilAI model developers have long offered consumers a simple deal: Use our technology for free through an online chatbot, or pay a monthly subscription to receive more usage, premium features, and advanced models. Anthropic is about to make that bargain a lot more complicated.
Starting on July 12 at 11:59PM PT, subscribers to Anthropic’s $20, $100, and $200-a-month plans will need to pay additional usage-based fees to access Claude Fable 5, the consumer version of the company’s highly capable Mythos 5 AI model. This appears to be the first time a frontier AI lab has gated a consumer AI model behind usage-based billing.
The rates will be the same as for developers using the company’s API: $10 for every million tokens sent to Claude, and $50 for every million tokens the model generates to answer your questions. So, if a subscriber to Anthropic’s $20-a-month plan sends a million tokens to Fable 5 in July, and the model uses a million tokens to answer their questions, they would owe an extra $60—or $80 total for the month. For comparison, $80 would get you about five months of Amazon Prime.
A million tokens is a lot—it’s roughly equal to 750,000 words, which is longer than the entire Lord of The Rings book series. But it’s not uncommon for AI power users to rack up thousands of dollars in API bills every month, in part because newer AI models like Fable 5 can spend a lot more tokens in a hidden chain-of-thought process to answer questions.
While “pay as you go” has long been the norm for developers accessing models through an API, AI labs have historically favored flat monthly subscriptions to generate revenue from consumers, and, in some cases, to control demand.
Still, the AI industry has been headed toward usage-based billing for a while now. Last year, AI coding startups like Cursor overhauled their unlimited AI subscriptions in favor of usage-based pricing models. And Anthropic recently started charging large business customers based on how much AI their employees used, rather than a predetermined fee. (The company could be making these changes to get its books in order ahead of a planned initial public offering.)
Some AI executives argue that subscription plans don’t make sense in the era of AI agents like Claude Code and Codex, which can use significantly more computational power than traditional chatbots.
“It’s possible that, in the current era, having an unlimited [AI] plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan,” Nick Turley, OpenAI’s former head of ChatGPT who now oversees the company’s enterprise products, said in a podcast interview earlier this year. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Anthropic hasn’t closed the door to all-encompassing subscriptions yet. In a statement to WIRED, Anthropic spokesperson Reem Ateyeh says the company aims to return Fable 5 to Claude’s subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows,” and intends to do so “as quickly as we can”—seemingly a reference to the company’s computational constraints. In recent years, Anthropic has struck multibillion-dollar deals for data center capacity with SpaceX, Amazon, and Google—though it’s still not as much as the company wants.
But it’s unclear when, if ever, Anthropic will not be constrained by data center capacity, and could offer Fable 5 within its subscription plans.
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