Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Sonnet 5
Head-to-head technical comparison of intelligence, capabilities, and API pricing.
Which should you use?
Claude Fable 5.1 leads on the composite index by 2.1 points (96.9 vs 94.8).
Cost is the sharper difference: Claude Fable 5.1 is 5x the input price of Claude Sonnet 5 ($10 against $2 per 1M), so at volume the choice is usually decided by budget rather than benchmarks.
Pick Claude Fable 5.1 when
- Higher composite index — 96.9 against 94.8, a gap of 2.1 points.
- Ahead on Arena Elo by 32 points (1504 vs 1472), which is outside the board's published confidence intervals.
- Stronger on MMLU-Pro: 95.9% against 94.6%.
Pick Claude Sonnet 5 when
- Cheaper input tokens — $2 against $10 per 1M, so Claude Fable 5.1 costs 5x as much to feed.
- Better value per point of measured capability: $0.021 per index point against $0.103.
Value per point of measured capability, at list input pricing: Claude Sonnet 5 $0.021 · Claude Fable 5.1 $0.103 per index point. Run your own token mix through the token cost calculator — a comparison at list price ignores caching and batch discounts, which move real bills more than this gap does.
Where these numbers come from
Figures as of 2026-09-07. Arena Elo and pricing are read from the public board and each vendor's own pricing page; see the full leaderboard for all 34 models and which columns are measured rather than estimated, or the benchmark matrix for scores benchmark by benchmark.