Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5, the first publicly available version of its high-profile Mythos model. What can Fable actually do? Many things became clear.
Ethan Mollick, a prominent AI researcher and academic at the University of Pennsylvania, has been experimenting with this model and seems to be having a lot of fun with it.
In his tests, Fable consistently “outperformed basically every other publishing model I’ve used by a significant margin,” Mollick wrote on his Substack on Tuesday. He added, “This addressed many issues and produced some surprising results. It would take up to 12 hours to run on a multi-page specification.”
Perhaps most surprising is that Morik used Fable to create a variety of video games. All of them were generated via “one initial prompt” in Claude’s code, the researchers said.
Among them, Snake is exactly right. You are a Pacman-like snake that walks around eating apples. The snake will not stop moving and will die if it escapes from the screen. It’s very 1980s arcade, but like many older games, it’s oddly addictive. I played it longer than I’d like to admit, and then I remembered that I’m a paid writer and not actually a fruit-loving snake.
Then there’s Strata. There, you wander through an endless network of underground tunnels, and your goal is simply to light as many lanterns as possible. The graphics look like a degraded version of Myst, not great, but the fact that there’s a game generated from a single prompt is impressive.
Molik also successfully created Duino, a game based on the Duino Elegy, a famous cycle of poems by poet Rainer Maria Rilke. I like the animation here the most. The player is alone in a nighttime landscape, but there’s nothing special about the gameplay other than wandering around while Rilke’s passages materialize on screen.
In addition to creating various instant games, Molik also used Fable to create isochronous maps (visualizations that show how long it takes to travel between any two locations). The accuracy and detail is amazing.
The impact is very clear. Software projects that once required entire teams, such as games, mapping tools, and highly complex specifications, can now be launched from a single prompt. This is why vibe coders around the world rejoice. For founders and operators looking at the AI capability curve, this is a useful data point that shows how quickly the lower bound is rising.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
