Claude Fable relaunch disappoints users with nerfed performance

The article reports that Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 has been restored for many users but is perceived as degraded due to stricter safety guardrails and routing to Opus 4.8; users report the model falls back or blocks on security-related prompts and some coding tasks. Anthropic appears to be applying a larger safety margin rather than the model itself being altered, and the company is expected to address false positives in future updates.