Anthropic's Claude models shift AI from answers to autonomous task execution

I tried Anthropic's new Fable 5 with everyday prompts -- these are the 5 worth stealing

Anthropic's newest Claude model is back, these prompts show what it can do After briefly pulling Fable 5 following concerns about potential misuse, Anthropic has redeployed the model with stronger safeguards. Most everyday users won't notice what changed behind the scenes. But now that it's back, it's worth discovering what the model can actually do. According to Anthropic, Claude Fable 5 is designed to sustain longer, more complex tasks, reason across multiple images, verify its own work and complete projects that previously required several rounds of prompting. As someone who has tested it before it was pulled and after, I can honestly say it has held up to these promises. To show causal users how the model works, I decided to share some everyday prompts worth trying for yourself. To be fair, these prompts are a lot like having an English professor write a grocery list, but it does show off what Claude Fable 5 does best. 1. Plan an entire event from start to finish Prompt: Plan my kid's birthday party from start to finish: a theme, a guest list template, a shopping list with estimated costs, a two-week countdown checklist, and a rainy-day backup plan. Check your own work for anything I'd forget, then give me the final version. This prompt can be tweaked and reused for just about any event from personal to professional. It's one of the easiest ways to highlight how Claude can stay focused during a long, multi-step task. Older AI models often complete most of the request but quietly skip important details. Fable 5 is designed to keep track of everything while also reviewing its own work before finishing. 2. Turn your fridge into this week's meal plan Prompt: Here are photos of my fridge, pantry shelf and freezer. What can I make for dinner tonight without shopping? Then suggest the three grocery items that would unlock the most meals for the rest of the week. For most people, Claude isn't their first choice for meal prep. But this prompt asks Claude to do something much harder than simply analyze an image. It showcases the model's ability to reason across several different images, recognize overlapping ingredients and turn them into practical meal ideas. For an added bonus, you can even prompt Claude to create a meal prep app based on your preferences. Prompt it in plain English using the above prompt as a thought starter and then go from there. 3. Untangle confusing paperwork Prompt: Here's my lease, an email from my landlord and a photo of the notice taped to my door. In plain English, explain what's changing, what I'm responsible for, every deadline I should know about and the questions I should ask before signing anything. Real life is messy but to AI it's just a bunch of patterns. For that reason, leaning on AI to untangle confusing document, legal jargon or professional spreadsheets that seem overwhelming, can be useful. Important information rarely lives in one document, which makes this an excellent test of Claude's ability to connect information across multiple sources. Rather than simply summarizing each document individually, Claude combines everything into one easy-to-understand explanation, highlights important dates and points out anything that seems unclear or contradictory. As always, I'd treat this as informational help -- not legal advice. 4. Build me a tool, not just an answer Prompt: Research the best carry-on suitcases under $250, then build me an interactive comparison chart where I can change how much I care about weight, durability, warranty and price. This is another opportunity to use a prompt like this and then turn it into an app by simply adding, "Build a lightweight shopping tool for future purchases." After a few questions, Claude will build an app in real-time that you can use immediately. What I like about this prompt is instead of simply asking for recommendations, I'm asking Claude to research current products and then create something I can actually use to make a decision. 5. Give me honest feedback -- not compliments Prompt: Here's my draft. Don't just improve it. Tell me the three weakest parts, what someone reading it is likely to think and what I'm avoiding saying. Many AI assistants lean toward being overly encouraging. Claude happens to be one of the least people-pleasing of all the chatbots. Because of this, I often ask Claude for constructive criticism -- I know it will give it to me straight. When it comes to feedback, I'm less interested in grammar corrections and want to identify weak arguments, awkward phrasing or blind spots that I missed, that's the kind of response that actually helps improve productivity. Final thoughts Claude Fable 5 is making user interactions with AI feel more complete. The biggest promise isn't faster answers but far fewer interruptions and less need for follow-up prompts. .Fable 5 is designed to carry complex tasks all the way to the finish line while checking its own work along the way. If you already subscribe to Claude Pro, Max, Team or an eligible Enterprise plan, now is a good time to experiment. Through July 7, Fable 5 is included within part of your weekly usage allowance before moving to a usage-credit model, giving subscribers a chance to see what Anthropic's latest model can do without spending additional credits. One final note: don't be surprised if an occasional request gets redirected to Claude Opus instead. The redeployed version of Fable 5 includes stricter safety systems, and some prompts are automatically routed to another model. If you see that notification, it's working as intended -- not a bug. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. 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I tried Claude Sonnet 5 with prompts that ask it to finish the job, not just answer the question -- and that's where the AI war is going

Anthropic has just released Claude Sonnet 5 for all users, and I wanted to test what it was good at. But the game has changed now. Sonnet 5 doesn't feel dramatically different from Gemini or ChatGPT if you ask it ordinary chatbot questions. Instead, the difference should show up when you stop asking for answers and start asking for completed work. Anthropic says Sonnet 5 is built for "multi-step software engineering work," sustained coding, tool use, debugging, and "messy technical contexts." It also says it can make plans, use browsers and terminals, and run more autonomously than smaller, cheaper models previously could. I'm not using Sonnet 5 for coding, but that doesn't mean I can't take advantage of its new abilities -- just like you can. So I stopped asking Claude for answers and started asking it to finish jobs, beginning with planning a trip to Bath, UK, for my family: my wife, me, and two teens. A trip to Bath When I tested it, Claude Sonnet 5 defaulted to its Medium level of effort, so that's what I used. Here's the first prompt I tried: "I want to test whether you can act more like an agent than a chatbot. My task is: Plan a weekend trip to Bath for two adults and two teenagers, including travel, lunch, one activity, estimated costs, and what still needs booking. Don't just give me advice. First, make a brief plan. Then identify which parts of the task you can complete yourself right now, which parts require tools or information you don't have, and which parts need human judgment. Then complete as much of the task as possible without stopping after the first obvious answer. At the end, give me: What you completed What still needs human action Any assumptions you made A short checklist I can use to verify the result The next best step" What I really liked was that, as Claude tackled this task, it gave me the option to be notified when it had finished. In reality, it only took a few seconds to come back with a plan, which included travel options, an itinerary, and a suggestion for lunch and something to do: a trip to The Roman Baths. To my delight Claude gave me an interactive map showing where all the places it recommended were. It also gave me a useful list of what it had completed, what required human action, the assumptions it had made, a verification checklist, and a "next best step" action point. It felt ready to keep working with me as more details came in, rather than treating its first answer as final. In fact, when I gave it more details, such as which day I was going to go, it gave me a visual weather report for the day. That was a really nice touch. Claude vs ChatGPT I also tried this prompt with ChatGPT-5.5 Medium and got a similar result. It acted as an agent, just like Claude did, and notified me when it had finished its tasks. It just didn't look as nice. There was no map, or any visual elements at all, and it felt more like I had been given a finished report than the start of a two-way conversation where it asked me for more details. Both chatbots recommended lunch and a trip to The Roman Baths. Interestingly, ChatGPT assumed I'd get the train, while Claude assumed I'd drive. They also recommended different places to eat, but the core information they both provided was solid. What was most impressive was that both models could adapt when I reframed the inputs. For example, when I gave them the ages of the kids, student status, a different mode of transport, or changed the day of the trip, both models could cope. Both also identified that since the oldest was a university student, he could get free entry to The Roman Baths. This part of the test was probably the most meaningful, as it felt much more "multi-step" than simply providing one answer. Overall, I'd give this test to Claude. You can clearly see that Sonnet 5 is set up for agentic actions. Neither Claude nor ChatGPT could actually do any of the booking for me at the moment, so we're still a long way from true personal-assistant-level autonomy. But for this kind of task, Claude currently has the edge. A different domain I wanted to test the models in a different domain that would let Claude show me it had genuinely improved, and that the Bath trip result was not just a fluke of the travel-planning use case. So I asked them both to: "Build me a simple household budget tracker as a spreadsheet or small tool." Both models thought for a while about this task, and churned through various options before opting to make a spreadsheet. ChatGPT produced a spreadsheet with a bar chart that tracked how much I'd spent on various household expenses against a budget. Claude, however, went for something simpler: dispensing with a budget, it just tracked actual expenses and created a pie chart showing where my money was going. Claude's initial approach was simpler, and easier to understand. Both models provided a .xlsx file, but only Claude provided a button to upload it straight to Google Drive so I could open it in Sheets. I told ChatGPT, "I wanted the graph to be a pie chart," and it responded: "Absolutely -- I'll update the spreadsheet itself so the dashboard uses a pie chart for spending by category, rather than the current graph style." It ran into a few problems because it was trying to show both the budget and actual values in the same pie chart, but eventually it worked out that it could show only one and produced a new spreadsheet that did exactly what I asked for. I then asked Claude to change its spreadsheet to provide a budget section too, and to change the graph into a bar chart. Again, it showed me its workings and added a budget section and bar charts perfectly. I can't really separate the two AI models on this task. Both proved they can handle multi-step tasks well, and both were happy to revise the result when I changed the brief. That, really, is the point. The most interesting AI tests now are not "which chatbot gives the best answer?" They are "which assistant keeps working until the job is actually done?" On that front, Claude Sonnet 5 feels extremely capable. ChatGPT was close behind, and in some ways just as effective, but Claude felt more naturally organized around the idea of completing work rather than simply responding to prompts. It asked fewer invisible questions, presented its output more helpfully, and made the whole process feel more like collaborating with an assistant than interrogating a chatbot. For now, neither model is ready to fully take over the job. I still had to check the details, make the decisions, and do the actual booking or uploading myself. But the direction of travel is obvious. The AI war is no longer just about who has the smartest chatbot. It's about who can build the assistant that gets you closest to a finished task. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.