Claude 4.1 Opus vs Claude Fable 5

Pick Claude Fable 5 if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Claude 4.1 Opus only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.

Claude Fable 5 is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 96 to 51. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.

Claude Fable 5's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 85.6 against 74.5. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is SWE-bench Verified, 74.5% to 95%.

Claude 4.1 Opus is also the more expensive model on tokens at $15.00 input / $75.00 output per 1M tokens, versus $10.00 input / $50.00 output per 1M tokens for Claude Fable 5. Claude Fable 5 is the reasoning model in the pair, while Claude 4.1 Opus is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Claude Fable 5 gives you the larger context window at 1M+, compared with 200K for Claude 4.1 Opus.