Anthropic Wants You to Pay Up for Claude Fable 5
Anthropic Wants You to Pay Up for Claude Fable 5
Anthropic 希望你为 Claude Fable 5 付出更多费用
AI model developers have long offered consumers a simple deal: Use our technology for free through an online chatbot, or pay a monthly subscription to receive more usage, premium features, and advanced models. Anthropic is about to make that bargain a lot more complicated.
长期以来，人工智能模型开发商为消费者提供了一个简单的交易：通过在线聊天机器人免费使用我们的技术，或者支付月费订阅以获得更多的使用额度、高级功能和更先进的模型。Anthropic 即将让这笔交易变得复杂得多。
Starting on July 12 at 11:59PM PT, subscribers to Anthropic’s $20, $100, and $200-a-month plans will need 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 frontier AI lab has gated a consumer AI model behind usage-based billing.
从太平洋时间 7 月 12 日晚上 11:59 开始，Anthropic 每月 20 美元、100 美元和 200 美元订阅计划的用户，若要访问 Claude Fable 5（该公司高性能 Mythos 5 AI 模型的消费者版本），将需要支付额外的按量计费费用。这似乎是前沿 AI 实验室首次将消费者 AI 模型置于按量计费的门槛之后。
The rates 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-a-month plan sends a million tokens to Fable 5 in July, and the model uses a million tokens to answer their questions, they would owe an extra $60—or $80 total for the month. For comparison, $80 would get you about five months of Amazon Prime.
其费率将与使用该公司 API 的开发者相同：发送给 Claude 的每百万个 token 收费 10 美元，模型生成回答所消耗的每百万个 token 收费 50 美元。因此，如果一位每月 20 美元订阅计划的用户在 7 月份向 Fable 5 发送了 100 万个 token，而模型又消耗了 100 万个 token 来回答问题，他们就需要额外支付 60 美元，即当月总共支付 80 美元。作为对比，80 美元大约可以购买五个月的亚马逊 Prime 会员服务。
A million tokens is a lot—it’s roughly equal to 750,000 words, which is longer than the entire Lord of The Rings book series. But it’s not uncommon for AI power users to rack up thousands of dollars in API bills every month, in part because newer AI models like Fable 5 can spend a lot more tokens in a hidden chain-of-thought process to answer questions.
100 万个 token 是一个很大的数字——大约相当于 75 万个单词，比整套《指环王》系列丛书还要长。但对于 AI 高级用户来说，每月产生数千美元的 API 账单并不罕见，部分原因是像 Fable 5 这样较新的 AI 模型在回答问题时，可能会在隐藏的“思维链”过程中消耗更多的 token。
While “pay as you go” has long been the norm for developers accessing models through an API, AI labs have historically favored flat monthly subscriptions to generate revenue from consumers, and, in some cases, to control demand.
虽然“按需付费”长期以来一直是开发者通过 API 访问模型的常态，但 AI 实验室过去一直倾向于采用固定月费订阅模式来从消费者那里获取收入，在某些情况下，也是为了控制需求。
Still, the AI industry has been headed toward usage-based billing for a while 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 business customers based on how much AI their employees used, rather than a predetermined fee. (The company could be making these changes to get its books in order ahead of a planned initial public offering.)
尽管如此，AI 行业一段时间以来一直朝着按量计费的方向发展。去年，像 Cursor 这样的 AI 编程初创公司彻底改革了其无限量 AI 订阅服务，转而采用按量计费模式。Anthropic 最近也开始根据员工的使用量，而不是预先设定的费用，向大型企业客户收费。（该公司做出这些改变可能是为了在计划首次公开募股前理清财务状况。）
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 computational power than traditional chatbots.
一些 AI 高管认为，在 Claude Code 和 Codex 等 AI 智能体时代，订阅计划已不再合理，因为它们消耗的计算能力远超传统的聊天机器人。
“It’s possible that, in the current era, having an unlimited [AI] plan is like having an unlimited electricity plan,” Nick Turley, OpenAI’s former head of ChatGPT who now oversees the company’s enterprise products, said in a podcast interview earlier this year. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
“在当前时代，拥有无限量 [AI] 计划可能就像拥有无限量用电计划一样，”OpenAI 前 ChatGPT 负责人、现负责该公司企业产品的 Nick Turley 在今年早些时候的一次播客采访中表示，“这根本说不通。”
Anthropic hasn’t closed the door to all-encompassing subscriptions yet. In a statement to WIRED, Anthropic spokesperson Reem Ateyeh says the company aims to return Fable 5 to Claude’s subscription plans “when sufficient capacity allows,” and intends to do so “as quickly as we can”—seemingly a reference to the company’s computational constraints. In recent years, Anthropic has struck multibillion-dollar deals for data center capacity with SpaceX, Amazon, and Google—though it’s still not as much as the company wants.
Anthropic 尚未关闭全面订阅的大门。Anthropic 发言人 Reem Ateyeh 在给《连线》(WIRED) 的一份声明中表示，公司目标是在“容量充足时”让 Fable 5 回归 Claude 的订阅计划，并打算“尽快”实现这一目标——这似乎是指该公司目前面临的计算资源限制。近年来，Anthropic 已与 SpaceX、亚马逊和谷歌达成了数十亿美元的数据中心容量协议，尽管这仍未达到公司的需求。
But it’s unclear when, if ever, Anthropic will not be constrained by data center capacity, and could offer Fable 5 within its subscription plans.
但目前尚不清楚 Anthropic 何时（甚至是否）能够摆脱数据中心容量的限制，从而将 Fable 5 纳入其订阅计划中。
Will Consumers Pay Up for Claude?
消费者会为 Claude 买单吗？
The pricing 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 June 7 blog post, 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 nationals, then subsequently approved it for general release on July 1.
此次价格调整是在 Fable 5 的一段延长促销期之后进行的，在此期间，Anthropic 向订阅用户免费提供了该 AI 模型。在 Anthropic 6 月 7 日的最初博客文章中，该公司表示预计对该 AI 模型的需求将“非常高，且难以预测”。自美国政府禁止外国公民使用该模型，随后又于 7 月 1 日批准其公开发布以来，人们对 Fable 5 的兴趣有增无减。
Whether or not Anthropic frames it this way, the usage-based pricing for Claude Fable 5 is a test of consumer appetite for the company’s AI models. While Anthropic has largely focused on the enterprise market in recent years, it’s increasingly cutting into the consumer space, which has been dominated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
无论 Anthropic 是否这样定义，Claude Fable 5 的按量计费模式都是对消费者对其 AI 模型需求意愿的一次测试。虽然 Anthropic 近年来主要专注于企业市场，但它正越来越多地切入由 OpenAI 的 ChatGPT 和谷歌的 Gemini 主导的消费者领域。
Claude reached 245 million unique visitors in the month of May, more than doubling since February, according to a report from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That’s a far cry from ChatGPT’s monthly unique visitors, which Sensor Tower lists at 1.11 billion, and Google Gemini’s 662 million. But Claude is growing quickly.
根据市场情报公司 Sensor Tower 的一份报告，Claude 在 5 月份的独立访问量达到了 2.45 亿，比 2 月份翻了一番多。这与 Sensor Tower 列出的 ChatGPT 每月 11.1 亿和谷歌 Gemini 6.62 亿的独立访问量相比仍有很大差距。但 Claude 的增长速度很快。
Claude’s rising popularity coincides with a backlash from some technology leaders, who claim that Anthropic is charging sky-high prices while soaking up everyone’s intellectual property. Anthropic is essentially betting it can become the “Apple of the AI Era,” and that there will always be a class of people willing to pay up, and play by its rules, for a premium AI model.
Claude 的日益普及恰逢一些科技领袖的强烈反对，他们声称 Anthropic 在吸纳所有人知识产权的同时，却收取天价费用。Anthropic 本质上是在押注自己能成为“AI 时代的苹果”，并相信总有一类人愿意为了优质的 AI 模型而支付高价并遵守其规则。
“The interesting dynamic happening right now is that no one wants to ask the question, ‘do I need the best intelligence for this task?’” says a person close to Anthropic, who requested anonymity to discuss the company’s thinking on this subject. “More often, when choosing what AI model to use, people are asking themselves, ‘Am I the kind of person who needs mid-level intelligence, or the best?’”
“目前发生的一个有趣的动态是，没有人愿意问‘我完成这项任务真的需要最顶尖的智能吗？’”一位接近 Anthropic 的人士表示，他要求匿名以讨论公司对此事的看法。“更多时候，当人们选择使用哪种 AI 模型时，他们问自己的是：‘我是那种需要中等水平智能的人，还是需要最顶尖智能的人？’”
Most of the highly paid people in finance, politics, and tech that I talk to are willing to pay up for the best AI model, whether it’s at work or in their personal life. Increasingly, these folks are considering the “best AI model” to be Claude. Whether Anthropic can maintain that reputation requires it to stay ahead of the competition. (Based on the early reactions I’ve seen to OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol, Anthropic has its work cut out for it.)
我交谈过的大多数金融、政治和科技领域的高薪人士都愿意为最好的 AI 模型买单，无论是在工作中还是在个人生活中。越来越多的人认为“最好的 AI 模型”是 Claude。Anthropic 能否保持这一声誉，取决于它能否保持领先地位。（根据我看到的对 OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol 的早期反应，Anthropic 还有很多硬仗要打。）
Companies like OpenAI and Google aren’t necessarily following Anthropic’s lead: They’re expected to introduce more ads to generate revenue in their free and low cost tiers, for example. But given how harshly Anthropic has positioned itself against advertising, raising prices may be its only solution in the near term.
像 OpenAI 和 Google 这样的公司并不一定会效仿 Anthropic：例如，预计它们会在免费和低成本层级中引入更多广告来创造收入。但考虑到 Anthropic 在反对广告方面的立场如此强硬，提高价格可能是其短期内唯一的解决方案。