Claude Fable 5.1's five effort levels span 11x in token usage, 58-66 on AA Index

ArtificialAnlys · x · 2026-09-02

Artificial Analysis measured Claude Fable 5.1's five effort settings spanning 11x in output tokens — from 13.1M at low effort to 143.7M at max — with Intelligence Index scores from 58 to 66.

All effort levels sit on the Intelligence vs Output Tokens frontier, but Fable 5.1's floor is higher than GPT-5.6's: GPT-5.6 Sol (medium) uses 12M tokens, slightly fewer than Fable 5.1's lowest. On cost, Fable 5.1 (max) runs $3.76 per task, 20% above Fable 5 ($3.14) and 1.6x Opus 5 ($2.34), driven by 1.7x the output tokens. Anthropic's cache read price cut from $1 to $0.25/1M tokens saves $1.40 per task; without it, cost would be $5.16. At xhigh, it scores 65 at $2.72 per task, $1.04 less than max.

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