Anthropic ends free Claude Fable 5 promotion, pushing users to plans costing up to $200 a month

Anthropic has officially ended the free promotion for its top-performing AI model, Claude Fable 5. Users who want to access Fable 5 without purchasing separate usage credits must now subscribe to a premium plan costing up to $200 per month — about 300,000 won.

Anthropic had originally set the promotion's end date for early this month, but extended it twice after rival OpenAI released its latest model, GPT-5.6. Industry observers say Anthropic prolonged the free access period to retain users amid intensifying competition over high-performance AI models.

Claude has been on a sharp growth trajectory — last month it recorded its highest-ever market share in South Korea's chatbot market. Users who experienced Fable 5's top-tier performance during the free promotion now face subscription costs of around 300,000 won a month to maintain similar access.

According to IT industry sources Thursday, Anthropic formally moved Claude Fable 5 into its higher-tier plans — the personal "Max" plan and the business-oriented "Team Premium" plan — starting Monday. The Max plan comes in two tiers: a 5x Max product at $100 per month and a 20x Max product at $200 per month.

Subscribers to the Max and Team Premium plans can use Fable 5 without purchasing separate usage credits. However, Fable 5 usage is capped at 50 percent of each plan's total weekly usage limit.

Users on the lower-priced personal "Pro" plan and the "Team Standard" plan must purchase separate credits based on their usage. The applicable API (application programming interface) rate is $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens after the first $100 in credits is consumed.

The official end of Anthropic's repeatedly extended Fable 5 free promotion has drawn considerable attention across the industry.

Earlier, after the United States government lifted export controls on Fable 5, Anthropic re-released the model on July 1 and launched the free promotion. Under the arrangement, subscribers on the Pro and Team Standard plans could use Fable 5 at no extra cost for up to 50 percent of their total weekly usage limit.

Anthropic had initially set July 7 as the promotion's end date, but when OpenAI released GPT-5.6 on July 9, it pushed the deadline back to Sunday, July 19. The extension was widely interpreted as a move to counter GPT-5.6's launch and prevent user churn. As Anthropic kept stretching the promotion window, developers began calling the period "Fable Time," drawing further attention across the industry.

Anthropic officially ended the promotion Monday. Free access for existing Pro and Team Standard subscribers was terminated, and a formal billing structure centered on higher-tier plans took effect.

Industry observers say the competitive battleground in the generative AI market has shifted toward usage limits. Given the steep computing costs of running top-tier models, companies are expected to lean increasingly on usage-based pricing strategies rather than lowering access barriers outright.

"The more users flock to a top-tier model, the faster inference costs pile up," an industry official said. "Now, beyond a model's raw performance, the usage volume and limit policies bundled into a monthly subscription are becoming a key factor that determines a service's competitiveness."