Users accuse Anthropic of degrading Claude Opus 4.6's and Claude Code's performance; the startup's employees publicly deny it degrades models to manage capacity
A growing number of developers and AI power users are taking to social media to accuse Anthropic of degrading the performance …
The dispute also tests the experience of a model Anthropic had positioned as more focused on difficult tasks. Public denials address the immediate allegation, but they do not by themselves resolve users' need to understand why output quality or responsiveness may appear to change.
First-order effects
Claude power users and Claude Code customers face greater uncertainty over whether inconsistent results reflect their prompts, workflow, usage limits, or the service itself.
Anthropic must manage a trust problem alongside its capacity constraints: employees have publicly rejected the claim that it deliberately reduces model quality to conserve capacity.
Second-order effects
Teams that depend on Claude for production coding or high-stakes tasks may increase testing across models, tiers, and times of day rather than treating a named model version as a uniform service.
The earlier peak-hour limit changes make clearer communication about limits, availability, and observable service behavior more important, since opaque constraints can be interpreted as quality degradation.
Third-order effects
If frontier-model demand continues to exceed readily available compute, model access may increasingly be defined by dynamic limits and service conditions, not just the model name or subscription tier.
Providers that can make capacity allocation and performance changes legible to customers may gain an advantage; absent that transparency, recurring disputes can weaken confidence in managed AI services even when no deliberate degradation occurs.
The trend: This is one data point in frontier capacity allocation becoming a product-trust and customer-governance issue, not merely an infrastructure operations issue.
@tengyanAI This is false. We defaulted to medium as a result of user feedback about Claude using too many tokens. When we made the change, we (1) included it in the changelog and (2) showed a dialog when you opened Claude Code so you could choose to opt out. Literally nothing sne…
AMD Senior AI Director confirms Claude has been nerfed. She analyzed Claude's session logs from Janurary to March: > median thinking dropped from ~2,200 to ~600 chars > API requests went up 80x from Feb to Mar. less thinking and failed attempts meaning more retries, burning more …
SOMEONE ACTUALLY MEASURED HOW MUCH DUMBER CLAUDE GOT. THE ANSWER IS 67%. the data shows Opus 4.6 is thinking 67% less than it used to. anthropic said nothing until the numbers went public. then suddenly Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) shows up on the GitHub issue. users [im…
Despicable clout chasing. They tested Opus today on 30 tasks, previous Opus 4.6 score was on just *6* tasks. DIFFERENT BENCHMARK 6 tasks in common results: 85.4% score today vs. 87.6% prev. Swing is mostly from a *single* fabrication without repeats - easily statistical noise [im…
you can run the nerfing play once, maybe twice. but anthropic will silently degrade production models to farm failure data every time. and this is where it stops being a clever strategy and starts being a trust problem.
I think the anthropic people are gaslighting us, sidestepping questions and answering a different question in lawyer speak brand trust erosion speedrun any%
Not enough compute is the correct take IMO. Which has quite a lot more implications if you think about it and play that out to its logical conclusion. Software still burdened by hardware's inability to keep up. Maybe software is 2-3 years ahead of hardware?
@edzitron Sometimes they make tweaks to Claude Code's harness to try to improve something, and there's a weird byproduct of it reducing overall quality of output and burning tokens It happens, but mostly with Claude over the other models. Claude seems more sensitive to stuff like…
I have seen scattered reports of Claude burning more tokens, and it does seem like token burn increased on openrouter in this period too, wonder if 4.6 is also part of it?
Claude being nerf'd and agents being exiled from the $200/mo plan are very consistent behavior if Anthropic is going public soon and will have finances/margin intensely scrutinized...
This is not enough. Claude and Anthropic need to explain all the measured increases in hallucination and degration as observed by AMD. You can't just handwave this away.
@Hesamation boris responded to this in depth in the issue- it's mostly just that we stopped showing thinking summaries for latency (you can opt-in to showing it) which was affecting the thinking measurement in the post https://github.com/...
basically: anthropic sneakily turned down how hard claude thinks before editing code, changed the default from “high” to “medium” effort, and hid the reasoning from session logs. all without telling users. an amd director had 7k sessions of telemetry to prove the degradation
Imagine being one of those CEOs who laid off thousands over “AI efficiency” only for the AI to get dumber than a pile of bricks weeks later. — Given how tokens work, you're paying more for a worse product. It now takes 5 minutes to be wrong which took 30 seconds for a right an…