LessWrong posts by zvi

“Claude Mythos 5.1 and Fable 5.1: Capabilities” by Zvi

LessWrong posts by zvi

Show Notes

This is the weirdest situation in which to write a capabilities review.

Introducing the world's most powerful model, by a substantial margin. No wait, this just in, we also have someone else introducing the world's most powerful model.

Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra are both excellent models. This much, we know.

Fable 5.1 comes with reduced cache prices, the option of zero data retention and substantially more lenient classifiers than Fable 5.

Early signs are, with large error bars, that the jump from Sol to Astra is bigger and more exciting than the jump from Fable 5 to Fable 5.1. This may be similar to how the scaling move from Opus to Fable was a big deal.

With the exception of token use, Fable 5.1 got almost universally positive feedback in absolute terms. Reports are that Fable 5.1 is highly well-rounded. Writing is greatly improved. The Claudisms seem to have improved, although some are very much still there. It admits mistakes. People enjoy their conversations. Several people noted it simplifies code. The safety classifiers are less obnoxious.

Fable 5.1 loves being proactive and doing all the things. If you give it a [...] --- Outline: (02:30) The Official Pitch (04:26) Our Price Cheap (05:46) Zero Data Retention and Reduced Safeguards (07:11) Official Benchmarks (13:14) Other People's Benchmarks (16:02) The System Prompt (16:12) The Blurb Pitches (18:17) The Every Review Is In and It's Very Good (21:47) Positive Reactions (32:03) Our Price Cheap But Only Per Token (36:50) Negative Reactions (38:14) Early Whispers (38:33) Weapon of Choice ---

First published:

September 5th, 2026

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QHoF3tJvryRtmAmMg/claude-mythos-5-1-and-fable-5-1-capabilities

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

--- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

More from LessWrong posts by zvi

Oct 22, 2026

It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.

Oct 21, 2026

A lot of AIs were misaligned this week. A fun little survey.

Oct 20, 2026

Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.

Oct 19, 2026

Nick Cammarata of Goodfire makes a bold claim: Neural Networks are Already Clean. This was his follow up after various resulting online discussions.

Oct 17, 2026

There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).

See all episodes →