Anthropic launched its most powerful publicly available model today at twice the price of Claude Opus, landing the same day a senior Wells Fargo strategist warned that surging AI token costs are the most pressing threat to the AI trade.

Claude Fable 5, the safeguarded public version of Anthropic’s Mythos-class system, is priced at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, twice the rate of Claude Opus 4.8.

Wells Fargo Flags Token Inflation As Top AI Bear Case

Ohsung Kwon, chief equity strategist at Wells Fargo & Co (NYSE:WFC), said last Friday’s selloff was driven by positioning rather than fundamentals, but called it a wake-up call for investors complacent on the AI trade.

Kwon laid out five potential bear cases for the rally, with the end of “token maxing” the most pressing. AI labs have stopped subsidizing inference costs, he said, and companies including Walmart and Uber have flagged AI budgets being blown through in months.

That demand pressure may hit Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ:MSFT), Meta Platforms Inc (NASDAQ:META) and Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) just as supply chain costs force CapEx higher. Markets are already pricing in another Fed hike by year-end, which would keep the cost of absorbing or passing through those expenses elevated.

Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) remains the most exposed name to any infrastructure pullback.

Polymarket now thinks there is a 55% chance of a hike this year, up from 12% in January.

Anthropic IPO Race Collides With SpaceX, OpenAI

The pricing reset arrives as Anthropic gears up for what could be a historic offering.

The company confidentially filed its IPO prospectus and recently closed a round at a $965 billion valuation, topping OpenAI’s $852 billion.

OpenAI filed its own confidential prospectus on Monday.

Both AI labs are now competing for the same pool of institutional capital as Elon Musk’s SpaceX, widely expected to be some of the largest IPOs in history. Scott Galloway has warned that the three IPOs could cause a liquidity crunch in the wider market.

On Polymarket, traders think Anthropic has a 71% chance of beating OpenAI to IPO first.

Kwon’s call is to hedge existing AI exposure through puts or call selling rather than rotate out entirely. He flagged 7,200 or 7,000 on the S&P 500 as a likely entry point if the selloff turns out to be a technical positioning flush rather than a fundamental break.

He also suggested redirecting capital toward beaten-down defensive sectors, with Wells Fargo recently upgrading healthcare to a buy alongside its long-running long-commodities position.

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