Pocket money.

Anthropic released its most powerful AI yet today. It's called Claude Fable 5, and the coverage will tell you all about how clever it is. It genuinely is clever. But the number that should make a small business sit up isn't a benchmark score. It's the price.

For the next fortnight, it's free. Properly free, on the subscription plans a lot of businesses already pay for. After that, it costs pennies a go. The most capable AI ever made generally available, for roughly what you'd find down the back of the sofa. That's the story. Not the power. The pocket money.

The expensive thing just got cheap

Rewind a year. "The best AI" meant something most ordinary businesses couldn't really touch. Big licences, a consultant to set it up, infrastructure to run it. It belonged to firms with deep pockets and a team to look after it. The local accountancy practice wasn't in that conversation. Nor was the letting agent, the builder, the small marketing studio.

Today they are. This week the corner shop and the multinational are reaching for the same tool, at the same trivial price. Same engine, same fuel cost. The gap that used to exist, the one where the big players could simply afford better AI than you, closed quietly this morning.

And it isn't a cut-down toy version, either. Stripe, no strangers to serious engineering, said it turned months of work into days. This is the real thing, handed to everyone at once.

The honest small print

Two caveats, because I'm not in the business of overselling.

The free part runs out. It's free until 22 June, then it moves to a low cost per use. And Anthropic has sensibly built some guardrails in. Ask it something genuinely dangerous, the cybersecurity and bioweapons end of things that's making other headlines this week, and it quietly hands you a more careful answer from its previous model instead. That's a feature, not a catch.

If you followed the model they decided not to ship earlier this year, this is the sequel. It's worth reading the label carefully, though, because what's been handed to the public isn't quite that model. The full version, Mythos, stays on a short leash, available only to vetted security and research partners. What's landed in everyone else's hands, Fable, is the same family with the genuinely dangerous capabilities deliberately held back. Powerful, but not the unrestricted thing the headlines worried about. The frontier moved within reach, and the sharpest edges stayed behind.

There's a neat tell in the names, once you know it. Fable and mythos mean almost the same thing, a tale told, a myth. That's no accident. Underneath, the two are the same model, and the only thing that tells them apart is the safeguards. Same story. One of them just has the dangerous chapters held back.

So what do you actually do with it?

Here's the part that matters, and it's smaller than you'd think. The barrier for most small businesses was never really the technology. It was cost, and it was access. Both just fell away. The only thing left standing between you and the benefit is deciding where to point it.

So decide. Pick one job, just one, that eats your week. The quote that takes an afternoon to write up. The monthly report nobody enjoys building. The inbox that needs triaging before you can think straight. The proposal you keep rebuilding from scratch. Take that one job and try it on this, this fortnight, while it costs nothing. You'll learn more in an hour of doing than in a month of reading think pieces like this one.

And if part of you is quietly convinced everyone else is already miles ahead, they're not as far ahead as you fear. The work that used to be too small or too expensive to bother commissioning is suddenly worth doing. Starting now puts you in good company, not last place.

The bit that isn't free

One straight word, because it's the bit worth getting right. The tool is cheap; the thinking isn't. The value was never in the model. It's in choosing the right job, giving it the right information to work from, and not casually pasting a client's confidential data into something without a thought for where it ends up. None of that is hard. It's just a bit of sensible discipline, the same discipline that turns a clever toy into a dependable part of how the business runs.

That's the work we do as M/OS: not buying you the cleverest AI, but making sure the cheap, clever AI you've now got is pointed at the right things and kept on a sensible leash of your own. If you'd like a steer on where to start, our ten-minute readiness check is free too, and a faster way to find your first job than guessing.

Pocket money

The price of the best AI in the world just dropped to pocket money. That's genuinely good news, and it's good news for the smaller business more than anyone, because the thing that used to keep this stuff out of reach is gone.

The businesses that get something out of this year won't be the ones with the biggest budgets. They never really were. They'll be the ones who picked one job, this fortnight, and started.