This is my feeling - Opus 4.6 was pretty good, 4.7 was degraded in quality, 4.8 further got degraded and Fable goes back to 4.6 + somewhat better. Is it anthropic playing us by giving us a not so good model in last 2 releases and then releasing a better model before the IPO?

They're vibemaxxing. But it's clear that AI is not going anywhere. It's going to become better and better.