"claude-fable-5"
is now returning 404
Developers who pinned "claude-fable-5" as their model ID after the June 9 launch are now hitting 404 errors. You need to fall back to Anthropic's auto-route or manually update your model config.
Devs who pinned early
are getting immediate errors
Fable 5 was available via API from day one of its June 9 launch. Many developers — particularly those working on code-migration, completion, and cyber-research validation tasks — embedded model: "claude-fable-5" directly into their code within hours of launch.
With Fable 5 taken offline under the export-control order, the model ID "claude-fable-5" now returns 404. Any code that pins it will fail immediately on the next API call.
Auto-route is fine——
only pinned model IDs break
Code using Anthropic's auto-route — API calls with no model specified — has automatically fallen back to Opus 4.8 and is unaffected. If you use Claude Code, check whether your config file still references "claude-fable-5" and update it. Also worth checking: environment variables and CI/CD secrets where the model string may be stored.
Find the string, swap the model,
retest outputs
Two steps: grep your codebase for "claude-fable-5" and replace with "claude-opus-4-8" or remove the model param entirely. Then revalidate output quality.
No restoration timeline has been given. For high-stakes workflows, this is the moment to reconsider whether model-version pinning is the right pattern at all. Auto-routing with a capability-level fallback policy is more resilient to events like this one.