BenchLeader

Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5

Verdict
  • Claude Fable 5 leads on quality: 68.8 vs 57.9.
  • Claude Fable 5 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, instruction following, knowledge, long context, multimodal, reasoning.
  • Claude Sonnet 4.5 (high) is 3.3× cheaper ($6.00 vs $20.00 per 1M blended).
  • Claude Fable 5 streams 1.6× faster (63 vs 40 tokens per second).
MetricClaude Fable 5Claude Sonnet 4.5 (high)
BenchLeader Index68.857.9
Agents & tools score73.6
Coding score68.756.4
Composite score84.1
Human preference score71.465.3
Instruction following score59.7
Knowledge score70.7
Long context score65.4
Multimodal score69.7
Reasoning score75.866.4
Blended price $/M$20.00$6.00
Output speed63 tok/s40 tok/s
Time to first answer81.4 s1.2 s
Context window1M1M
Remote Labor Index16.1%
APEX-Agents45.0%
FrontierCode53.5%
Epoch Capabilities Index163.4
LMArena Text15061456
LMArena Hard Prompts15321487
LMArena Coding15521520
LMArena WebDev16281393
LMArena Vision1330
AA Intelligence Index49.7
IFBench63.5%
AA-LCR82.3%
AA-Omniscience43.3
Terminal-Bench Hard62.9%
GPQA Diamond (AA)92.6%
Humanity's Last Exam (AA)55.5%
SciCode (AA)61.0%
τ²-Bench Telecom (AA)98.5%
LiveCodeBench89.8%
MMLU-Pro91.5%
LegalBench88.6%
CorpFin71.8%
TaxEval76.9%
Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals)80.5%
SWE-bench (Vals)95.0%
GPQA Diamond (Vals)93.2%
Vals Index66.0
MCP Atlas83.3%
PRBench Finance53.9%
PRBench Legal52.6%
HiL-Bench56.3%
EQ-Bench 41340
Kagi LLM Benchmark88.8%
SWE-bench Verified (bash only)71.4%

Data as of 2026-09-13. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.

Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.5: questions

Is Claude Fable 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Claude Fable 5 leads on quality: 68.8 vs 57.9. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Fable 5 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-13, but check the category scores for your use.
Is Claude Fable 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.5 for coding?
Claude Fable 5 scores higher in coding (69 vs 56 on the category index, where 50 is average).
Which is cheaper, Claude Fable 5 or Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is cheaper: $6.00 against $20.00 per million tokens, blended at three input tokens per output token.
Which is faster, Claude Fable 5 or Claude Sonnet 4.5?
Claude Fable 5 streams faster: 63 against 40 output tokens per second.
Which has the larger context window?
Both accept 1M tokens of context.