AI model creators have long offered consumers a basic proposition: apply our technology for free via an online chatbot, or pay a monthly subscription to get greater usage, premium features and advanced models. Anthropic will make this transaction much more complicated.
Let’s move on July 12 at 23:59 Polish timesubscribers to Anthropic’s $20, $100 and $200 per month plans will have to pay additional usage-based fees to access Claude Fable 5, the consumer version of the company’s high-performance Mythos 5 artificial intelligence model. This appears to be the first time the pioneering AI lab has used a consumer AI model for usage-based billing.
The rates will be the same as for developers using the company’s API: $10 for each million tokens sent to Claude and $50 for each million tokens generated by the model to answer your questions. So, if a $20/month Anthropic subscriber sends one million tokens to Fable 5 in July, and the model uses the million tokens to answer his questions, he will owe an additional $60 – for a total of $80 for the month. For comparison, $80 gets you about five months of Amazon Prime.
While pay as you go has long been the norm for developers accessing models via API, AI labs have historically favored fixed monthly subscriptions to generate revenue from consumers and, in some cases, to control demand.
Still, the AI industry has been moving toward usage-based billing for some time. Last year saw AI coding startups like Cursor has reviewed unlimited AI subscriptions in favor of usage-based pricing models. Recently, Anthropic began charging fees to immense business customers how much artificial intelligence their employees usedinstead of a predetermined fee. (The company may be making these changes to spotless up its books 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 apply much more processing power than conventional chatbots.
“It is possible that in this day and age, having an unlimited number [AI] The plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan,” Nick Turley, former head of ChatGPT at OpenAI who now oversees the company’s enterprise products, said on the podcast interview earlier this year. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
Anthropic hasn’t closed the door on all-inclusive subscriptions yet. In a statement to WIRED, Anthropic spokesman Reem Ateyeh says the company intends to reinstate Fable 5 on Claude’s subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows” and intends to do so “as quickly as possible” – an apparent reference to the company’s computing limitations. In recent years, Anthropic has entered into multi-billion dollar data center capacity deals with SpaceX, AmazonAND Google– although it’s still not as much as the company wants.
However, it is unclear when, if ever, Anthropic will be unconstrained by data center capacity and be able to offer Fable 5 as part of its subscription plans.
Will consumers pay for Claude?
Prices change after extension promotional period for Fable 5, in which Anthropic offered subscribers an AI model at no additional cost. In the first issue of Anthropic on June 7 blog postthe company said it expects demand for the AI model to be “very high and complex to predict.” Interest in Fable 5 has only increased since the U.S. government banned it from being available to foreigners and then approved it for general release on July 1.
Whether or not Anthropic puts it that way, Claude Fable 5’s usage-based pricing is a test of consumer appetite for the company’s AI models. While Anthropic has largely focused on the enterprise market in recent years, it is increasingly moving into the consumer space, which has been dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.