SWE-2 vs. Claude Fable 5.1

SWE-2 is Cognition’s coding model for software engineering agents, developed to improve the balance between capability, reasoning cost, and execution efficiency. The model is post-trained from Kimi K3, a multi-trillion-parameter model that had already received extensive reinforcement learning for agentic coding. Cognition further trained SWE-2 with a reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes several reasoning-effort levels during a single training run. These effort levels let users trade off speed and cost against deeper planning, codebase exploration, and verification for more difficult assignments. SWE-2 is designed to reduce the over-exploration seen in earlier models by identifying relevant files and implementation paths more quickly. Its software engineering abilities include repository analysis, code writing and editing, debugging, testing, build and lint workflows, terminal tasks, and verification of completed work. The model places additional emphasis on writing end-to-end tests, catching edge cases and regressions, and gathering evidence instead of simply accepting assumptions in a prompt. Cognition’s training approach also uses cost penalties tied to the model’s performance frontier, length-weighted reward baselines, speculative decoding improvements, low-precision inference techniques, and expanded reinforcement learning data. Training data includes more diverse repositories, additional instruction-following requirements, and iterative verifier improvements designed to reduce reward hacking and false validation. SWE-2 is benchmarked against models such as GPT-6 Astra, GPT-5.6 Sol, Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and Kimi K3, with Cognition positioning it around strong coding performance at substantially lower cost. SWE-2 is intended for use across Cognition’s Devin ecosystem, including Desktop and CLI, with rollout to Devin Web and Fusion.

Claude Fable 5.1 is an advanced general-purpose AI model from Anthropic focused on coding, scientific research, knowledge work, business processes, and long-horizon agentic reasoning. It is the generally available counterpart to Claude Mythos 5.1, which uses the same underlying model but is offered with different safeguards for vetted cybersecurity and life sciences users. Compared with Claude Fable 5, Fable 5.1 shows stronger performance across agentic coding, research, computer use, multidisciplinary reasoning, business workflow automation, and other complex benchmarks. The model is designed to remain effective during long-running tasks that involve planning, tool use, repeated verification, code modification, research, and multi-step decision making. In software engineering scenarios, it can investigate difficult bugs, trace problems across large codebases, perform code review, and work through complex implementation tasks with less supervision. Anthropic also positions Fable 5.1 as a stronger research model, with demonstrated capabilities in scientific analysis, computational modeling, and other technically demanding workflows. Improvements to cache-read pricing reduce the cost of reusing previously processed context, making the model more economical for workflows that involve long conversations, large codebases, or repeated tool calls. Fable 5.1 introduces updated enterprise privacy and security options, including Enterprise Frontier Safeguards and zero-data-retention access for eligible customers during the rollout period. Its cybersecurity protections are designed to permit more benign defensive security work, including vulnerability discovery, while continuing to restrict higher-risk activities such as exploit development and certain penetration-testing tasks. The model is available through Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, the Claude API, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure under the claude-fable-5-1 model identifier for API users.