My hypothesis is the opposite, that they don't have anything better.

Look at OpenAI, they've been outclassed by Opus 5.5 two months ago; obviously they don't yet have a response.

Now Anthropic is releasing this lackluster Fable 5.2, a week or two before their IPO.

It's barely an improvement at all, makes exactly the same mistakes as Opus 5.5. Not even worth using with the speed and cost penalty.

The much rumored internal Anthropic model is listed on the Fable 5.2 system card as an even smaller improvement over Mythos 5.2 than Fable is over Opus 5.5.

I expected a larger version of Opus 5.5 would be a significant improvement to launch before the IPO. Turns out it didn't scale and the improvement is marginal.

I am quite disappointed.