Claude Fable 5 vs GPT-5.6 Sol: a $100 music video bake-off

The music-video-arena crew handed two models the same song (Uptown Funk), a budget cap, and six tools, including web_search, generate_video, and a shell with ffmpeg. Each model hunted down its own video generators, shot the clips, and cut the final edit on its own. Four runs total: Fable 5 and Sol at $25 and $100 budgets.

All four finished unassisted and produced a complete video. At the $100 cap, Sol spent $36.57 on generation while Fable 5 went up to $48.60 and rendered at 1920x1080. Fable's token costs ran $16.99 to $25.05 per run; Sol stayed around $3 to $4.

Fable 5's full $100 run came to $73.65, the priciest of the bunch. Sol's $100 run mixed three video models in a single pass, while Fable stuck to Seedance 1.0 Pro. The harness is open source on GitHub.