Here’s something you may have noticed: you can use Anthropic’s Fable 5 for a month, but then it’s not part of your subscription anymore. After that, you can only use it on a pay-as-you-go basis. And this isn’t just an Anthropic thing - it’s part of a broader trend in AI.
Intelligence from the tap
These models are becoming less and less a fixed monthly subscription and more like a utility bill. Think electricity, water, gas - but for intelligence. Intelligence comes out of the pipe: you open the tap, you close the tap, and you pay based on how much you use.
Why don’t flat subscriptions work here? A subscription only makes sense when the provider can predict its costs - when usage doesn’t cause big swings in what they spend. If you hammer Gmail, Salesforce, or Instagram all day, it barely changes their cost per user. Once the software is built, it scales across millions of people for basically nothing extra.
AI is different. Every time you fire off a prompt, somewhere a burst of energy gets spent that’s comparable to running two or three microwave ovens. That doesn’t scale like normal software. It has to be paid for by consumption.
The “too dangerous” story
Fable is one of the first clear examples of this. And while we’re at it, let’s frame the whole spin around it properly.
Mythos gets sold as this super-dangerous model - dangerous “up to a point.” These are corporate cover-your-back stories, the usual American PR line. It’s not actually that dangerous. What is true is that it’s too heavy - too expensive to run - to just hand out to everyone. So for a while now they’ve needed to do two things:
- Find a way to charge for this stuff by consumption.
- Have premium models to sell only to the slice of customers who pay the most.
That’s why Mythos is the first model designed from the ground up to be B2B - business to business. Anthropic essentially says: this model, with this power and these capabilities, we only sell to the enterprise.
Who counts as a “responsible party”?
The framing is that the model is too dangerous, so it gets placed “in the hands of responsible parties.” But which American corporation counts as a responsible party, exactly?
It’s like me saying: “I’ve got the weapon of the century, and I’m handing it straight to Satan.” Obviously that’s nonsense. They put it in the hands of the people with money, because that’s their business - that’s the network they want to build with the high-end B2B model.
Meanwhile, everyone else gets a less powerful model, still under the banner of “safety.” And that less powerful thing? You still pay more for it, and you pay for it by consumption, not by subscription.
To me it all looks perfectly clear.
On a personal note: I’ve become a real boy. Tomorrow they’re interviewing me on Eta Beta on Radio 1 at 10:30. I want everyone tuned in.