The AI Footprint ← All 266 models

How much energy does Claude Fable 5 use?

Anthropic · released 2026-06-09

Claude Fable 5 uses about 0.673 Wh – 25.1 Wh of electricity to answer a typical question. That places it 259 of 266 among the models we can measure, and every figure here is calculated the same way as every other model.

A typical question
0.673 Wh – 25.1 Wh
A long, complex answer
15.7 Wh – 587 Wh
Capability
163.3
Energy rank
259 of 266
Human votes
1493

How capable is it, really?

The capability figure of 163.27 is a composite over 58 benchmarks — Epoch AI's Capabilities Index, which folds in software engineering, agentic tool use, long-context comprehension and creative writing as well as science reasoning. It is one number standing for a lot of separate tests, so treat a small gap between two models as noise rather than a ranking.

30,057 people have voted on it in blind head-to-head comparisons on LMArena, giving it a rating of 1493. This is the only figure here that measures whether anyone actually prefers the answers, rather than how the model scores on a test. Broken down, people rate it 1520 on coding, 1496 on creative writing, 1505 on following instructions.

What this figure is

Inferred  The maker publishes no size at all, so it is inferred from how capable the model is and when it was released. A wide bracket, not a figure. Every model on this site is calculated the same way, so the comparison holds even where the absolute value carries uncertainty. Our figures are good to roughly a factor of two to three, which is why we only ever state a difference of 5× or more.

We cannot pin this one down. Anthropic has never published how Claude Fable 5 is built, and the two plausible answers are far apart — which is why a range is shown rather than a figure. It is listed because leaving it out would reward the silence, and it is barred from every headline claim on this site.
The figure above is an understatement. Claude Fable 5 generates reasoning text you never see, and that text costs energy to produce. Our calculation counts a fixed answer length, so the real figure is higher — we cannot say by how much, because the amount is not published.

Is there a better choice?

A lighter model that does the job
Nothing we track is both at least as capable as Claude Fable 5 and meaningfully lighter. On our figures this is already a sensible choice for its standard of work.

What Anthropic publishes

Energy cannot be worked out without knowing how big a model is. Of the 23 models from Anthropic that we track, 10 can be assessed at all — the rest publish too little for anyone outside the company to calculate anything.

Where these figures come from

Capability and the roster come from Epoch AI, whose Capabilities Index is the 58-benchmark composite quoted above. Energy is calculated with EcoLogits and calibrated against laboratory measurements from ML.ENERGY. Human preference comes from LMArena. All four are public and free; the full method is here.

These figures are published under CC BY 4.0 — use them anywhere, including commercially, with credit to The AI Footprint.

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Figure calculated 2026-09-20 · how these numbers are made · the full comparison of 266 models