Breaking

Claude Fable 5 Builds 3D Map of San Francisco at 20M-Token Cost

July 4, 2026 at 01:15 EDT

Foundation Models
AI Agents
Media Generation

A demo in which Anthropic's top-tier "Claude Fable 5" model, run at the near-maximum "Extra High effort" setting, generated a detailed 3D city map of San Francisco is drawing attention among developers. The output includes the Golden Gate Bridge, roughly 2,600 buildings, ferries crossing the bay, an animation of rolling fog, and the headquarters of 27 tech companies — consuming about 20 million tokens.

June 9, 2026 · Anthropic

A 3D San Francisco, Built in a Single AI Generation

Claude Fable 5 at "Extra High effort" wrote a browser-based, city-scale 3D map of San Francisco in one run — the Golden Gate Bridge, ~2,600 buildings, moving ferries and rolling fog — burning roughly 20 million tokens to do it.

20M

tokens for one SF map

2,600

buildings rendered as code

tech HQ locations placed

Scale of the scenes, by buildings generated

Each block ≈ 5,000 buildings — code generation alone reaches metropolitan scale.

2,600

San Francisco

46,000

Manhattan

Model specs

Context 1M tokens
Max output 128K tokens
Knowledge cutoff Jan 2026
Effort Low → Extra High

Pricing (per 1M)

Input $10
Output $50 (2× Opus 4.8)
Prompt caching −90% input
Batch API ½ price

The upside

Complex 3D maps, games and web tools in one generation — a Delhi map at ~1.5M tokens / $75 — a major boost to development speed and long-horizon agent work.

The catch

Extra High runs are extremely costly — subscription plans drained in minutes, single queries reaching tens of dollars. High latency, fast token burn and security guardrails that often trigger.

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