Model comparison
Claude Fable 5.1 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Anthropic against NVIDIA, compared on context, price, and verified benchmark results.
Catalog record checked September 3, 2026Individual provider fields may changeEvidence confidence: High — see receipts below
Anthropic
Claude Fable 5.1
Frontier
NVIDIA
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Frontier · Open weights
| Specification | Claude Fable 5.1 | NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | NVIDIA |
| Tier | Frontier | Frontier |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Max output | 128K | Not verifiedUnverified |
| Input / 1M tokens | $10 | Winner: $0.50 |
| Output / 1M tokens | $50 | Winner: $2.20 |
| Weights | Closed | Open |
| Parameters | Not disclosedUnverified | 550B total / 55B active (MoE) |
| Reasoning levels | adaptive | low, high, max |
| Modalities | text, image | text |
| API model id | claude-fable-5-1 | nemotron-3-ultra-550b-a55b |
| Released | September 1, 2026 | June 4, 2026 |
| Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (2026-08-14) | Winner: 66 | 54 |
| Humanity's Last Exam (2026-09-01) | 65 | Not verifiedUnverified |
| Terminal-Bench 2.1 (2026-09-05) | 91.4 | Not verifiedUnverified |
| DeepSWE 1.1 (2026-09-03) | 67.4 | Not verifiedUnverified |
Prices are USD per million tokens at standard rates, excluding batch and caching discounts. Bold indicates the better figure where one is objectively better. Values we could not confirm from the provider are shown as “Not verified” rather than estimated.
Benchmark receipts
- 2026-09-05: Artificial Analysis Terminal-Bench v2.1 (independent, Terminus 2, max effort — current AA leader)Agentic terminal work: multi-step tasks executed in a sandboxed shell environment. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Scores across Terminal-Bench major versions (v1 vs v2) are NOT comparable; harness configuration (container, time limits) also shifts results.
- 2026-09-03: OpenAI GPT-6 Astra launch chart (independent cross-vendor; Fable 5.1 not on the official Datacurve leaderboard)Agentic software engineering: pass@1 on real repo tasks with reported cost per completed task. Comparability: directly comparable
- 2026-09-01: Anthropic announcement comparison table (vendor, with tools; 60.9 no tools)Frontier-knowledge ceiling: extremely hard multi-domain questions written to be near-impossible without deep expertise. Comparability: comparable with caveat — Subset/tool configurations (text-only vs with-tools) differ between vendors and materially change scores; must match configuration to compare.
- 2026-08-14: Artificial AnalysisComposite index blending reasoning, knowledge, and coding evals into one 0–100 score. Comparability: directly comparable — AA occasionally rebaselines the index scale between snapshots — a score captured on one date is only comparable to same-snapshot scores (check measuredAt).
Pricing tiers: Claude Fable 5.1: Priced with Fable 5 at $10/$50 per MTok; cache reads cut 75% to $0.25/MTok. Adaptive thinking always on (default effort high); knowledge cutoff Jun 2026. Sibling Mythos 5.1 launched the same day. · NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open weights (weights + data + recipes); $0.50/$2.20 per MTok is the third-party hosted rate (OpenRouter). 550B/55B MoE.
Claude Fable 5.1
Claude Fable 5.1 is Anthropic's September 2026 flagship refresh, debuting at the top of LiveBench and the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
Best for
- Frontier agents
- Hardest reasoning work
- Fable 5 workloads at the same price
Watch out
Early-life model: leaderboard position is from launch-week boards; recheck before committing spend.
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Nemotron 3 Ultra is NVIDIA's open-weight (550B/55B) frontier MoE with a 1M-token context.
Best for
- Open-weight frontier
- Self-hosting on NVIDIA GPUs
- Reasoning
Watch out
Top US open-weight until Thinking Machines Inkling; verify hosted pricing.
When the cheaper one wins
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is cheaper on output at $2.20 per million tokens against $50 for Claude Fable 5.1 — about 23×. Use the cheaper tier for classification, extraction, summarisation, and any task where the expensive model’s extra score does not change the accepted output. The expensive one only pays if your hardest task actually fails on the cheap tier. These are standard-tier API rates, excluding batch and cache discounts.
Run the model pickerEvidence confidence: High
How strong and complete the evidence behind this comparison is — not a prediction of which model is better.
- Pricing verified on both sides — Input and output rates are verified for both models.
- 3/5 core specs verified on both sides — Not published for at least one side: max output, parameter count.
- 1 shared named benchmark with differing scores — Measured on: Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index.
- Verified within the last 90 days — Newest catalog check was 8 days ago.
- Both models carry source citations — Each side has at least two catalog sources on record.
Source receipts
Each catalog figure was checked against the provider or an independent second source on the date shown.
- Claude Fable 5.1: Anthropic pricing — Fable 5.1/Mythos 5.1 $10/$50 (accessed 2026-09-03)
- Claude Fable 5.1: Anthropic models overview — Fable 5.1 (1M context, 128K output) (accessed 2026-09-03)
- Claude Fable 5.1: Artificial Analysis — Fable 5.1 Intelligence Index 66 #1 (accessed 2026-09-01)
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: NVIDIA — Nemotron (accessed 2026-08-29)
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra (accessed 2026-08-29)
Related comparisons
- Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Haiku 4.5
- Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Mythos 5.1
- Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Opus 5
- Claude Fable 5.1 vs Claude Sonnet 5
- Claude Fable 5.1 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro
- Claude Fable 5.1 vs Gemini 3.1 Pro
Diving deeper on one model? Claude Fable 5.1 · NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Common questions
Claude Fable 5.1 vs NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra
Answered from the verified figures on this page rather than general guidance.
Is Claude Fable 5.1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra cheaper for input?
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is cheaper at $0.50 per million input tokens, against $10 for Claude Fable 5.1 — roughly 20× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Claude Fable 5.1 has tiered pricing: Priced with Fable 5 at $10/$50 per MTok; cache reads cut 75% to $0.25/MTok. Adaptive thinking always on (default effort high); knowledge cutoff Jun 2026. Sibling Mythos 5.1 launched the same day. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra has tiered pricing: Open weights (weights + data + recipes); $0.50/$2.20 per MTok is the third-party hosted rate (OpenRouter). 550B/55B MoE.
Is Claude Fable 5.1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra cheaper for output?
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra is cheaper at $2.20 per million output tokens, against $50 for Claude Fable 5.1 — roughly 23× the price. Output tokens usually dominate a real bill, so weigh the output rate more heavily than the input rate. These are base rates; Claude Fable 5.1 has tiered pricing: Priced with Fable 5 at $10/$50 per MTok; cache reads cut 75% to $0.25/MTok. Adaptive thinking always on (default effort high); knowledge cutoff Jun 2026. Sibling Mythos 5.1 launched the same day. NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra has tiered pricing: Open weights (weights + data + recipes); $0.50/$2.20 per MTok is the third-party hosted rate (OpenRouter). 550B/55B MoE.
Which has the larger context window, Claude Fable 5.1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra?
Both accept about 1M tokens of context, so document length will not decide between them.
Do Claude Fable 5.1 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra support the same reasoning levels?
Claude Fable 5.1 exposes adaptive, while NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra exposes low, high, max.
Should I use Claude Fable 5.1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra?
Both sit in the frontier tier, so the choice usually comes down to price and context rather than capability. Claude Fable 5.1 suits frontier agents; NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra suits open-weight frontier.
Can I self-host Claude Fable 5.1 or NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra?
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra publishes open weights, but self-hosting and third-party provider access depend on the licence, hardware, serving support, and availability. Claude Fable 5.1 is a closed model whose supported access paths are controlled by its provider.
Next step
Choosing between them
The verified figures that separate this pair, computed from the catalog rather than restated boilerplate.
- Input price: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra costs $0.50 per 1M tokens versus $10 for Claude Fable 5.1 — a 20x difference at the headline tier.
- Measured capability: Claude Fable 5.1 leads Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index 66 to 54 (measured 2026-08-14).
- Deployment: NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra publishes weights you can self-host; the other is API-only.
Choosing a harness rather than a model — Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code, Windsurf, or Lovable? Compare agentic harnesses · Latest releases.