Ramp data: Fable 5, launched in June, has plateaued at ~11% of spending on Anthropic tools, as companies shift to cheaper models; Opus 5 surpassed Fable 5
AI lab's Fable 5 has met with sluggish demand from corporate clients — Anthropic's US customers are using cheaper alternatives …
Financial TimesGeorge Hammond
Context & Ripple Effects
Fable 5 entered Anthropic’s paid plans before shifting to usage credits, a change Anthropic linked to capacity; Ramp’s July reading had already put the model at only 6% of business tokens, with cost cited as the likely constraint. Fable 5’s initial plan availability therefore did not translate into broad corporate consumption.
The new spending plateau comes even as Anthropic widened its overall share lead in Ramp’s July index. That separates Anthropic’s platform momentum from demand for its newest, higher-cost model.
First-order effects
Anthropic’s US business customers are allocating only about 11% of their Anthropic-tool spending to Fable 5 and are directing more spend to cheaper models; Opus 5 has moved ahead of Fable 5.
Anthropic faces a weaker-than-expected spending mix for Fable 5 despite its June launch and the subsequent move to usage-credit billing.
Second-order effects
Corporate AI buyers gain leverage to steer Anthropic workloads among models on price, rather than treating the newest release as the default purchase.
Fable 5’s limited share intensifies the need for Anthropic to justify its cost against lower-priced options within its own product lineup.
Third-order effects
If this allocation pattern persists, enterprise model procurement will increasingly reward cost per useful task over frontier-model novelty, fragmenting spend across model tiers rather than concentrating it in a flagship release.
The trend:Enterprise AI buying is entering a procurement-driven phase in which model vendors must convert technical launches into cost-justified workload adoption.
The best AI model doesn't always make the best business. Most companies don't need the most powerful model. They need one that is good enough for the job at the right price. AI is starting to look like a real market.
Not so surprising if @AnthropicAI are struggling to attract users to Fable 5. Claude use is much more geared to coding/computing and mathematical tasks than ChatGPT, but 15%-25% of conversations still apparently search substitution. https://www.ft.com/...
More data than open-source AI is taking share from OpenAI and Anthropic. Open source has gone from 28% token share to 62% token share @vercel over the last 2 months. Chart from @rauchg Super impressive given that the sum of OpenAI and Anthropic accelerated in July. So net
“.. This breaks a pattern of corporate users defaulting to the most powerful models. .. If sustained, the shift could radically alter the business model of frontier labs ..” @FT https://www.ft.com/...
Not looking good for them: Anthropic's Fable 5 is losing ground to cheaper open-source models: According to the FT, Anthropic's most powerful model accounts for just 11% of its corporate AI spending on Ramp. The reason is simple: Fable 5 is too expensive, while cheaper models
This interesting. I stopped using Fable since I didn't see any improvement over Opus for my needs, but I didn't know that everyone else did the same. Right now I'm even considering dropping to opus 4.8, because 5 is too “pro-active”. https://www.ft.com/...
Anthropic's US customers are using cheaper alternatives to its most powerful AI tool, raising questions about the group's high-spending and valuation - $2 trillion. https://www.ft.com/...
Disagree. Anthropic is not (yet) “cooked”. They have a decent chance of surviving. They have a lot of talent; they have significant market share. They have executed well. But anyone who invests money in them at a $2 trillion dollar valuation when interest in their premium
None of this is new to my Substack readers as I wrote about it three days ago with better information and details. FT: “Spending on Fable 5, Anthropic's largest and priciest model, has plateaued at only about 11 per cent of overall outlay on the company's tools, more than two
11% is the problem Anthropic can't benchmark away. More than two months after launch, Fable 5 holds only ~11% of Anthropic spend across 70,000 companies. Opus 5 already passed it. A $2T IPO story now has a pricing problem, not a capability problem.
The crazy part is that this isn't necessarily a “bad model” problem. If Fable 5 is genuinely strong but companies keep choosing cheaper models for most workloads, price becomes a feature. At scale, even a small difference per request adds up fast. The AI race is starting to
One way to read this is “spending on Fable has plateaued” but that's not what Anthropic cares about: they care about total spend across all models! A better way to read this graph is “Fable is a great complement to the other models, which has increased overall revenue for