Anthropic launches Fable 5.2, a more powerful and less expensive version of its artificial intelligence model

One week before its probable IPO, the American start-up Anthropic, creator of the artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Claude, unveiled on Monday a more powerful and less expensive version of its cutting-edge AI, called Fable 5.2. This launch precedes its entry on Wall Street, potentially record-breaking if Anthropic manages to convince investors, despite the recent fall in technology stocks and in the face of competition from cutting-edge models from OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, or Google.

The company could raise up to 100 billion dollars, according to the American press, which would make it the largest IPO in history, ahead of that of SpaceX in June (nearly 86 billion). Its shareholders dangled this summer a valuation of 2,000 billion dollars, reduced to around 1,500 billion in October after a slowdown in its growth, falling from one quarter to the next from 145% to 45%, while the company has committed to spending nearly 900 billion dollars on computing power in the years to come.

Some investors are now talking about a valuation of 1100 to 1300 billion, according to the Bloomberg agency. Each new version of Claude has so far boosted its sales, assures Anthropic: more than 80% of its second quarter turnover came from models released less than six months ago, according to its prospectus.

After an October in which the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 5.3% - its worst month since March 2025 - AI-related stocks fell further last week, fueled by fears of increased regulation of data centers after the Democratic victory in the US mid-term elections. The company derives almost all of its revenue from its AI tools and cannot, like Google or Meta, rely on an advertising empire. Its turnover reached 17 billion dollars in the third quarter, twelve times more than a year earlier.

OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra in early September and Google unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon in late October, the latter at a launch price four times lower than that of Fable 5.2. According to Anthropic, Fable 5.2 produces its responses up to 30% faster than the previous version, and costs companies 20% less, but its price remains twice as high as Opus 5.5, the model one step below which is the company's current commercial star.

The Chinese company Moonshot, for its part, published Kimi K3.1 Pro on November 4, a so-called open model, that is to say downloadable and modifiable without dependence on its creator, with performance close to the best American models. Fable 5.2 is accessible to everyone, while Mythos 5.2, its version less restricted on cybersecurity and biology requests, remains reserved for organizations handpicked to avoid diversions, such as hacking or the design of biological weapons, a precaution that OpenAI and Google have since imitated.