Fable 5.2 Effort Sweep: Cheapest Level That Still Passes

Why this matters this week

Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.2 on November 9, 2026. It is priced at $8 per million input tokens and $40 per million output tokens, runs a 1M-token context window, and uses adaptive thinking that is always on. The headline benchmark story is that it beats Opus 5.5 on several coding and agent evals. The story that affects your bill is quieter: the effort setting now decides how many thinking tokens the model burns before it answers, and the API default for Fable 5.2 is high.