Anthropic suggests mixing Claude models to cut costs

Anthropic's Claude development team has proposed two model combination strategies to cut costs by mixing Claude Fable 5 and Sonnet 5. In advisor mode, Sonnet 5 handles most tasks, only calling Fable 5 when extra guidance is needed. Tests on SWE-bench Pro show it reaches 92% of Fable 5's performance at 63% of the cost.

In orchestrator mode, Fable 5 acts as a planner, assigning subtasks to multiple Sonnet 5 agents. This setup achieves 96% of Fable 5's performance on BrowseComp at 46% of the cost. These options aim to offer users a more flexible and affordable way to use AI models.