Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) vs OpenAI: o3 Deep Research
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) is the pick when cost matters at scale, OpenAI: o3 Deep Research when you need seed (reproducible sampling).
Monthly cost at list price for five common workloads. Token counts per unit are stated so you can scale them to your own traffic. A workload that does not fit a model's context window is marked rather than priced.
Workload (per month)
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch)
OpenAI: o3 Deep Research
Difference
Customer-support chatbot
50,000 conversations — each a 6-turn conversation (1,500 in / 400 out tokens)
$875
$1,550
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) saves $675
RAG search over documents
20,000 questions — each a question answered from ~8 retrieved passages (6,000 in / 500 out tokens)
$850
$1,600
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) saves $750
Coding / tool-using agent
2,000 tasks — each a multi-step task with tool calls and file context (60,000 in / 6,000 out tokens)
$900
$1,680
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) saves $780
Batch summarisation
10,000 documents — each a 6,000-word report summarised to a page (8,000 in / 600 out tokens)
$550
$1,040
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) saves $490
Long-document analysis
500 documents — each a 150-page contract or codebase read in one pass (100,000 in / 2,000 out tokens)
$275
$540
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) saves $265
Capabilities side by side
Capability
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch)
OpenAI: o3 Deep Research
What it lets you do
Tool / function calling
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
call your APIs and run agent loops
Structured output (JSON schema)
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
return JSON that validates against your schema
Reasoning / thinking mode
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
spend extra tokens thinking before answering hard problems
Image input
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
read screenshots, charts and scanned pages
Audio input
—
—
take speech or audio directly
File / PDF input
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
accept documents without your own parsing step
Image output
—
—
generate images, not just text
Built-in web search
✓ Yes
✓ Yes
answer from live web results
Seed (reproducible sampling)
—
✓ Yes
repeat a generation for tests and evals
Log-probabilities
—
✓ Yes
read token confidence for classification and scoring
From each model's published parameters and input/output types. “—” means not advertised, not proven absent.
Price history
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch): price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-09-03.
OpenAI: o3 Deep Research: price unchanged since we started tracking it on 2026-03-10.
Which should you choose?
Choose Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) if…
cost matters at scale — it is 43% cheaper on a typical 3:1 input/output mix ($875 vs $1,550 a month for 50,000 support chats)
you need to fit long inputs in one request — 1M tokens is roughly 1,500 pages, against 300
you want the newer model — released 2026-09-01, 11 months after the other
Choose OpenAI: o3 Deep Research if…
you need seed (reproducible sampling) — to repeat a generation for tests and evals; Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) does not advertise it
you need log-probabilities — to read token confidence for classification and scoring; Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) does not advertise it
Frequently asked questions
Is Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) better than OpenAI: o3 Deep Research?
Neither wins outright: Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) is the pick when cost matters at scale, OpenAI: o3 Deep Research when you need seed (reproducible sampling). In short: Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) when cost matters at scale, you need to fit long inputs in one request, you want the newer model; OpenAI: o3 Deep Research when you need seed (reproducible sampling), you need log-probabilities.
Which is cheaper, Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) or OpenAI: o3 Deep Research?
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) is cheaper: $10.00 vs $17.50 per 1M tokens at a typical 3:1 input/output mix, 43% less. For 50,000 support conversations a month that is $875 against $1,550.
How much do Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) and OpenAI: o3 Deep Research cost per million tokens?
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) costs $5.00 per 1M input tokens and $25.00 per 1M output tokens; OpenAI: o3 Deep Research costs $10.00 input and $40.00 output. Output tokens are billed separately, so long answers shift the gap.
Which has the bigger context window, Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) or OpenAI: o3 Deep Research?
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch): 1M tokens, about 1,500 pages, against 200K (about 300 pages) for OpenAI: o3 Deep Research.
Do Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) and OpenAI: o3 Deep Research support function calling and JSON output?
Tool calling — Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch): yes, OpenAI: o3 Deep Research: yes. JSON-schema structured output — Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch): yes, OpenAI: o3 Deep Research: yes.
Can Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) or OpenAI: o3 Deep Research read images?
Yes, both accept image input.
Is Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) or OpenAI: o3 Deep Research free to use?
No free variant is listed for either; both are pay-per-token.
What is the maximum output length of Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) and OpenAI: o3 Deep Research?
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) can write up to 128K tokens (about 96,000 words) per response; OpenAI: o3 Deep Research up to 100K (about 75,000 words).
When were Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) and OpenAI: o3 Deep Research released?
Anthropic: Claude Fable 5.1 (batch) was listed on 2026-09-01; OpenAI: o3 Deep Research on 2025-10-10.
Claude Fable 5.1 improves on Claude Fable 5 across the board, with the biggest gains in agentic coding, long-running agentic workflows, and knowledge work: long code refactors, front-end and visual...
o3-deep-research is OpenAI's advanced model for deep research, designed to tackle complex, multi-step research tasks.
Note: This model always uses the 'web_search' tool which adds additional cost.