This is a small release with exactly one headline, and the headline earns it: Claude Fable 5.1 is here, and Elyra has it on day one. But the more interesting story might be what we didn't change — so let's talk about both.
Elyra ships its model registry inside the package. No phone-home, no remote config, no surprise model swaps behind your back — the models your Elyra knows are the models it shipped with. That's a deliberate choice: it keeps offline mode honest and your setup reproducible.
The tradeoff is that when something new lands upstream, we cut a release. So when a new Anthropic flagship appears, you get a version bump whose entire job is: update, and it's in your /model picker. This is that release.
Anthropic's newest flagship, available in Elyra everywhere it exists upstream:
/model fable
claude-fable-5-1 Claude Fable 5.1 anthropic $10/$50
anthropic.claude-fable-5-1 bedrock (us)
global.anthropic.claude-fable-5-1 bedrock (global)
anthropic/claude-fable-5.1 gateways
The numbers worth knowing: 1M token context, 128K output, and adaptive thinking with a new max effort level above xhigh — the model decides when to think, and you can now tell it to really lean in. Cache reads at $0.25 per million make long agentic sessions far cheaper than the sticker price suggests.
At $10/$50 this is a premium instrument. Which brings us to the decision part.
Every time a shiny new flagship lands, there's a temptation to crown it the default. We didn't. Elyra's Anthropic default remains claude-sonnet-5 — and that's a philosophy, not an oversight.
A default model is what runs when you haven't expressed an opinion: quick questions, routine edits, the everyday middle of the work. That job description calls for the best value, not the best ceiling. Sonnet 5 at $3/$15 does everyday agentic coding brilliantly. Fable 5.1 at $10/$50 is what you reach for when the problem deserves it.
The good news: with smart routing you don't have to choose. Pin Fable 5.1 to your deep tier and let the router escalate only when a turn actually warrants it:
/route
Next turn: tier=deep (architecture question spanning 14 files)
cheap → gemini-3.7-flash
standard → claude-sonnet-5
deep → claude-fable-5-1
The expensive model works the hard problems; the sensible model handles the rest. Your invoice reflects the difference.
GLM-5.3 on HuggingFace — the new GLM now reachable through HF inference too
A wave of OpenAI :batch variants on the gateways — half-price siblings for gpt-4o through gpt-5.6. If you run budgeted /goal loops with the goalBatchModels setting, your unattended work just got a wider discount aisle
New arrivals: Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, Inception's Mercury 2.5 preview, IBM Granite 4.2, and a MiMo "ultraspeed" variant
elyra update
Then /model fable if today's problem deserves the good stuff — or change nothing, and enjoy knowing your defaults were chosen on purpose.