Fable 5 Effort: Cut Thinking Token Costs in Python

Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5 on June 9, 2026, and it is now the most capable model the company offers to everyone. It also behaves differently from every Claude before it in one way that catches teams off guard the first week: thinking is always on and you cannot turn it off. Send a one-line prompt and the model may still burn hundreds of reasoning tokens before it answers. At $50 per million output tokens, and with thinking tokens billed as output, that surprise lands on your invoice.