Anthropic pushes back Fable 5 cutoff — I still don’t trust them

Anthropic just pushed the deadline for removing Fable 5 from Pro and Max subscriptions to July 19. The original cutoff was today.

I wrote yesterday that if they went ahead with the change, I’d probably cancel my $20/month Max plan. Fable 5 is the main thing that makes the subscription worth it. Without it, the plan is barely better than what I can get elsewhere, and I’m not going to pay for a downgraded experience.

The extension itself doesn’t change much. It’s the second or third time they’ve set a hard deadline, let it arrive, and then walked it back at the last minute. That pattern is starting to look calculated: announce something unpopular, ride the outrage cycle, then “listen to feedback” and delay. It keeps the model in the news and maybe gets people to commit before the next supposed cutoff. But all it does for me is make them feel unreliable.

I don’t want to check my subscription page every month to see if the model I signed up for is still there. If Fable 5 isn’t a guaranteed part of the plan, the plan isn’t worth having. OpenAI and others are close enough, and local models keep improving. I’m not going to play this game indefinitely.

What I’m watching now: whether this extension is actually used to restructure plans in a way that works, or if July 19 comes and goes with another last-minute pause.