alt Hacker NewsIt gets worse. You might wonder "why now"? Well ... this happened 2 days ago:
https://x.com/follistatindev/status/2119129611510383014
With early handouts of Qwen4 starting to be reported 5 days ago ... so if they're good, they would have had some hours to evaluate Qwen4 against Claude 5.5 and, then or right after was when Anthropic decided to put out 5.2 ...
So yeah ... benchmaxxing and all that. BUT nevertheless, the published results seem to say that Qwen4-Max appears to match Opus 5.5 on some benchmarks, and Qwen4-27B (probably by going even harder than Qwen3.8-27B on thinking/inference time compute) can beat Sonnet 5.5 on some things.
I guess they're not taking any chances. Keep in mind that Anthropic has declared they have non-public models (it's in their IPO filing). These are referred to by the shorthand names Model 2, Model 3, and Model 4. Essentially 4 is better than 3 is better than 2.
Fable 5.2 is "2.5" so to speak. So Anthropic was holding back, but not anymore. And now they can dial the performance up once more with what they have ready, and probably once more after that.
Replies
Do you know of any rumors if they are still planning to release Fable 5.5 before the IPO or today's 5.2 is it?
Dario is gonna have to honeypot someone from Alibaba to get ahead.
“Why now” - they are about to IPO. It has been obvious for months that they would drop a new flagship model at exactly this point.
It would be funny though if you are right and that model is Fable 5.5 in a couple weeks.