Forbes reports that Anthropic extended free access to Claude Fable 5 for a second time in a week, keeping its most capable model available to subscribers at no extra cost through July 19. The move, communicated by email and an updated support page, reads as a direct response to OpenAI's public rollout of its GPT-5.6 family. Fable 5 is a top-tier model whose access was briefly restricted earlier this summer under a U.S. export-control directive before being restored. The repeated extensions capture how aggressively Anthropic and OpenAI are now competing for paying users, using temporary access to premium models as a retention tool.