Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican

Claude Fable 5.1, released on September 1, 2026, is Anthropic's new AI model that achieves significantly improved performance on scientific benchmarks (52.6% on Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1), though other improvements are more modest. The author tested Fable 5.1's ability to generate SVG images of a pelican riding a bicycle across five reasoning effort levels (low, medium, high, xhigh, max), finding that the model produced increasingly detailed and thoughtful outputs as reasoning effort increased, with the max setting producing the best result despite taking 13 minutes and costing $3.30.