Looks like it happened. I actually assumed they would just enable it for all today, considering the Sol and Kimmi releases this past week. They doubled down instead.
EDIT: Was an outage, they just fixed it (https://status.claude.com/)
Internal error: Usage credits are required for this model.: {
"errorKind": "rate_limit"
}
Still had 70% of available usage, thought I can use it till July 19, 2026, 11:59 pm PT? I guess this is an error and I am happy to see I am not the only one with this problem, so I hope there will be enough noise it comes back as announced.
> We are aware of an issue preventing users from selecting Claude Fable 5 within Claude.ai, Claude Code, and other surfaces, and are working to resolve this issue.
Jul 17, 2026 - 18:36 UTC
Yeah when things like this have happened on fridays before they've reset everyone's limits etc. Would not be surprising if this is the pretext for something of this sort.
They said 17th, I was expecting a PR today in which they'd say they included it in all plans. Was actually checking every couple hours here on HN, only to get my work stop half-way through just now.
Yep, right in the middle of a big implementation plan.
I don't mind them changing the terms, I do mind them changing the terms without warning - I had concrete plans to wrap up my fable development long before the July 19th deadline, but, nope, here in the middle of the 7/17 afternoon it was working, then it cut me off.
I think it was cutting off on the 12th, then they extended to the 19th, but apparently they changed their minds again, which really sucks when you've started a big change and now your context window that understood what it was doing gets rug-pulled.
They have to refund usage credits that people accidentally spent now though, since this was unannounced many are running agents and would be billed for tokens that would be covered by their plans. You can't lie to customers like this, if it was announced beforehand it would be fine but not like this.
Good luck getting accurate accounting for all that before July 20th.
Subscription accounts just get their "best effort" service during the subscription window.
Opus is struggling through the deploy operation that Fable may have been in the middle of, it's supposed to be idempotent, but I wonder how reliable that is... Fable had re-deployed a dozen times in the past 3-4 days, but Opus (lacking the context window) seems like it's hit a wall.
Funny how the default read of any outage now is "strategic gating" — a week of Sol and K3 launches has everyone primed to see 4D chess in what turns out to be a broken status page.
Probably a cash grab to burn through users' usage credits before everyone switches to OpenAI or Kimi this weekend. I've lost all trust in Anthropic over these Fable shenanigans.
Wouldn't be surprised if they issued credits or extended the deadline again as an apology.
> Update - We are aware of an issue preventing users from selecting Claude Fable 5 within Claude.ai, Claude Code, and other surfaces, and are working to resolve this issue.
I have to assume it's a secret test to see how many users immediately switch to Opus vs. how many stop/leave as a way to approximate what will happen if they actually turn it off...I mean, I'm sure it was a mistake and there will be some kind of announcement soon.
"We are aware of an issue preventing users from selecting Claude Fable 5 within Claude.ai, Claude Code, and other surfaces, and are working to resolve this issue."
Has anyone else noticed a crazy drop in their CREDITS since the servers went back up? I had plenty of space left and a cap set up, but it completely drained my account.
I was selected into fable, my context window had restructured my database schema and was about to deploy and migrate the existing database, then "you need to purchase credits to use this model" appeared right in the middle of the session.
Yes, in the middle of a bunch of design work on my library. Sigh…
Fable was really a step ahead of Opus on this kind of work. I guess I will be looking at Codex unless Fable is included in my Max subscription on Claude code – or the next Opus is a clear improvement (and comes out soon).
Fable was doing really well for me too, and I had scoped out a nice development plan that was going to come in on-time under token budget before the 7/19 cutoff, which just became the 7/17 cutoff right in the middle of a database schema update / migration.
I wonder if they put Fable in charge of Fable and Fable has learned dark patterns on how to gauge if there's enough whales on the hook to attached a feeding tube to the token API so they can print money.
Imagine building your solution using a 3rd party library, it still builds during your PR reviews and when you merge, it no longer builds. How would you feel?
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