AI model developers We’ve long offered consumers a simple deal: use our technology for free via an online chatbot or pay a monthly subscription to receive more usage, premium features and advanced models. Anthropic is about to make that deal a lot more complicated.

Starting July 12 at 11:59 pm PT, subscribers to Anthropic’s $20, $100, and $200 per month plans will be required to pay additional usage-based fees to access Claude Fable 5, the consumer version of the company’s highly capable Mythos 5 AI model. This appears to be the first time a cutting-edge AI lab has included a consumer AI model behind usage-based billing.

The fees will be the same as for developers using the company’s API: $10 for every million tokens sent to Claude and $50 for every million tokens the model generates to answer your questions. So if a subscriber to Anthropic’s $20/month plan sends one million tokens to Fable 5 in July, and the model uses one million tokens to answer their questions, they would owe an additional $60, or $80 total for the month. By comparison, $80 would get you about five months of Amazon Prime.

One million tokens is a lot: it is equivalent to approximately 750,000 words, which is longer than the entire the lord of the rings book series. But it’s not uncommon for AI power users to rack up thousands of dollars in API bills each month, in part because newer AI models like Fable 5 can spend many more tokens in a hidden chain-of-thought process to answer questions.

While “pay-as-you-go” has long been the norm for developers accessing models through an API, AI labs have historically favored fixed monthly subscriptions to generate revenue from consumers and, in some cases, to control demand.

Still, the AI ​​industry has been moving toward usage-based billing for some time now. Last year, AI coding startups like Cursor overhauled their unlimited AI subscriptions in favor of usage-based pricing models. And Anthropic recently started charging large enterprise clients based on how much AI their employees used, rather than a predetermined rate. (The company could be making these changes to get its books in order ahead of a planned initial public offering.)

Some AI executives argue that subscription plans don’t make sense in the era of AI agents like Claude Code and Codex, which can use significantly more computing power than traditional chatbots.

“It is possible that, in today’s era, having unlimited access [AI] “The plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan,” Nick Turley, OpenAI’s former ChatGPT director who now oversees the company’s enterprise products, said in a podcast interview earlier this year. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Anthropic hasn’t closed the door on comprehensive subscriptions yet. In a statement to WIRED, Anthropic spokesperson Reem Ateyeh says the company intends to include Fable 5 back into Claude’s subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows,” and intends to do so “as quickly as we can,” apparently a reference to the company’s computational limitations. In recent years, Anthropic has struck multimillion-dollar deals for data center capacity with SpaceX, Amazon and Google, although it’s still not as much as the company wants.

But it’s unclear when, if ever, Anthropic won’t be limited by data center capacity and could offer Fable 5 within its subscription plans.

Will consumers pay for Claude?

The price change follows an extended promotional period for Fable 5, in which Anthropic offered the AI ​​model to subscribers at no additional cost. In Anthropic’s initial blog post on June 7, the company said it expected demand for the AI ​​model to be “very high and difficult to predict.” Interest in Fable 5 has only grown since the US government banned it for foreign citizens and subsequently approved it for general release on July 1.

Whether Anthropic frames it this way or not, Claude Fable 5’s usage-based pricing is a testament to consumer appetite for the company’s AI models. While Anthropic has largely focused on the enterprise market in recent years, it is increasingly moving into the consumer space, which has been dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.