Claude Fable 5.1 draws a pelican for $3.30 — and it's the best one yet
Claude Fable 5.1 made me a nice animated pelican
Simon Willison tests Anthropic's new Claude Fable 5.1 by asking it to generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle across its five reasoning levels. While low and medium skip reasoning entirely, the max level produces a detailed, charming pelican with a hat and fish basket after 14 minutes of deliberation. The post also covers animating the result and notes the model's strong performance on the Terminal-Bench-Science benchmark.
Setting effort to `max` gave me the best pelican I’ve seen from any of Anthropic’s models.
- chrononaut
> The wheels in the video are rotating in the wrong direction
I thought they were going in the correct direction until you mentioned that. Perhaps you / it created an unintended bistable illusion :)
- emmelaich
Are the wheels rotating in the wrong direction? I stared at it they seemed to reverse. Perhaps a bit of a optical illusion.
Looking at the SVG, the direction is missing but the default is clockwise. So I'd say it's good!
- andai
That's pretty nice. Here's Gemini 3.7 for reference:
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/13/llm-gemini/
I found Gemini's one much more impressive initially, but on closer inspection it's got a whole bunch of issues. Missing leg, objects overlapping etc.
(We might say the seat looks "uncomfortable" xD)