Anthropic releases Claude Fable 5.1 and cuts cache read pricing by 75%

The cut is easy to miss, because it lands on the line almost nobody reads. Anthropic puts cache reads at $0.25 per million tokens after a reduction of 75%, which is another way of saying they stood at $1.00 before it. Set that against the input price on the same card, $10 per million tokens, and a cache read now costs a fortieth of what those same tokens cost the first time you sent them.

That ratio is the whole story. A cache read is what you pay when you send Claude context it has already seen, which is what happens on every turn of a long conversation and at every step an agent takes through the same standing instructions. Ask one short question and you never touch it. Run a long brief through step after step and you touch almost nothing else, which is why Anthropic’s own saving runs from roughly a quarter for ordinary use up to nearly half for the agentic kind.

Every figure above is Anthropic’s own published list price, read on the date in the sources, and every quotation above is marked as the outlet that wrote it. What this site adds is what comes next: the Claude row on our API price table now has a recorded starting point, so the next time any of these figures move, the move will be dated against this one instead of arriving as a number with no past. That is also the number the readings above are missing. Whether the cut is large depends on how much of your traffic is a repeat, and that ratio is the one figure neither a vendor page nor an outlet can know about you.