Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6
Verdict
- Claude Fable 5 leads on quality: 70.5 vs 60.4.
- Claude Fable 5 is stronger in agents & tools, coding, composite, human preference, instruction following, knowledge, long context, multimodal, reasoning.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is stronger in maths.
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 is 3.3× cheaper ($6.00 vs $20.00 per 1M blended).
- Claude Fable 5 streams 1.5× faster (63 vs 42 tokens per second).
| Metric | Claude Fable 5 | Claude Sonnet 4.6 |
|---|---|---|
| BenchLeader Index | 70.5 | 60.4 |
| Agents & tools score | 74.4 | 54.6 |
| Coding score | 70.5 | 57.1 |
| Composite score | 91.8 | 67.5 |
| Human preference score | 71.6 | 62.0 |
| Instruction following score | 62.9 | 56.9 |
| Knowledge score | 71.4 | 62.3 |
| Long context score | 67.8 | 66.6 |
| Multimodal score | 69.7 | 60.6 |
| Reasoning score | 75.9 | 65.2 |
| Maths score | – | 62.7 |
| Blended price $/M | $20.00 | $6.00 |
| Output speed | 63 tok/s | 42 tok/s |
| Time to first answer | 102.3 s | 2.2 s |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| GPQA Diamond | – | 87.4% |
| OTIS Mock AIME | – | 85.8% |
| SWE-bench Verified (Epoch) | – | 75.2% |
| Terminal-Bench | – | 53.4% |
| Remote Labor Index | 16.1% | – |
| APEX-Agents | 45.0% | – |
| FrontierCode | 53.5% | 24.3% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 163.4 | 152.3 |
| LMArena Text | 1507 | 1472 |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1533 | 1504 |
| LMArena Coding | 1551 | 1528 |
| LMArena WebDev | 1628 | 1521 |
| LMArena Vision | 1330 | 1282 |
| LMArena Agent | – | -1 |
| AA Intelligence Index | 49.7 | 30.4 |
| IFBench | 63.5% | 56.6% |
| AA-LCR | 82.3% | 80.0% |
| MMMU-Pro | – | 73.3% |
| AA-Omniscience | 43.3 | 12.2 |
| Terminal-Bench Hard | 62.9% | 53.0% |
| GPQA Diamond (AA) | 92.6% | 87.5% |
| Humanity's Last Exam (AA) | 55.5% | 33.6% |
| SciCode (AA) | 61.0% | 50.1% |
| τ²-Bench Telecom (AA) | 98.5% | 79.5% |
| AIME (Vals) | – | 92.3% |
| LiveCodeBench | 89.8% | 82.1% |
| MMLU-Pro | 91.5% | 87.3% |
| IOI | 72.3% | – |
| LegalBench | 88.6% | 82.1% |
| CorpFin | 71.8% | 65.3% |
| TaxEval | 76.9% | 77.1% |
| MedQA | – | 92.1% |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (Vals) | 80.5% | 57.3% |
| SWE-bench (Vals) | 95.0% | 77.4% |
| GPQA Diamond (Vals) | 93.2% | 85.6% |
| Vals Index | 66.0 | 50.6 |
| MCP Atlas | 83.3% | 69.5% |
| PRBench Finance | 53.9% | – |
| PRBench Legal | 52.6% | – |
| HiL-Bench | 56.3% | – |
| EQ-Bench 4 | 1340 | 1207 |
| Kagi LLM Benchmark | 88.8% | – |
Data as of 2026-09-10. Best configuration of each model; every score links to its source on the model pages.
Claude Fable 5 vs Claude Sonnet 4.6: questions
- Is Claude Fable 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.6?
- Claude Fable 5 leads on quality: 70.5 vs 60.4. The BenchLeader Index combines every independent quality benchmark; Claude Fable 5 is ahead overall as of 2026-09-10, but check the category scores for your use.
- Is Claude Fable 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.6 for coding?
- Claude Fable 5 scores higher in coding (71 vs 57 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Is Claude Fable 5 better than Claude Sonnet 4.6 for agentic tasks?
- Claude Fable 5 scores higher in agentic tasks (74 vs 55 on the category index, where 50 is average).
- Which is cheaper, Claude Fable 5 or Claude Sonnet 4.6?
- Claude Sonnet 4.6 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 4.6?
- Claude Fable 5 streams faster: 63 against 42 output tokens per second.
- Which has the larger context window?
- Both accept 1M tokens of context.