Fable 5.1 Slashes Cache Pricing 75%, Muse Spark 1.3 Storms the Mid-Tier: A Flagship Reshuffle in One Week
In the first week of September, three labs moved within 48 hours: Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.1 and cut prompt-cache read pricing to $0.25, Meta undercut the mid-tier with Muse Spark 1.3 at $1.25/$4.25, and OpenAI pushed flagship pricing to $10/$50 with GPT-6 Astra. This post breaks down the logic behind each strategy and the cost-optimal way to route across tiers.