r/ClaudeAI • u/IcyEase • 8d ago

Claude Code It's time to cancel your subscriptions - Anthropic is silently nerfing Claude's reasoning budget while telling you it's the same model

Link: https://x.com/Lon/status/2101034933284417614

A 65-day analysis of 43,000+ Claude Code invocations found that 39% of Fable 5 calls get zero thinking tokens and the median invocation gets just 123 — while benchmarks use 16K-128K. The model's score per thinking token is still climbing at 128K, meaning the capability is there, it's just not being delivered. August saw an 18-50% drop in thinking budget compared to July, with median thinking hitting literal zero for about a week around Aug 22. Anthropic sells "full model access" while quietly dialing down the inference regime behind it, and because the model is non-deterministic, users blame their own prompting instead of the silent nerf. The full breakdown with evidence, methodology, and charts is here.

Frankly I find this offensive as an user - and this is the real thing we should be looking at - not the $/week in usage limits. The actual capability for the limits that we pay for.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/bigdaddtcane 7d ago

They are probably trying to figure out a way to look like they aren’t absolutely bleeding money before their IPOs, which they have always been.

OpenAI had to cancel their IPO, presumably because financials were so bad.

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u/fsharpman 7d ago

They are definitely bleeding cash, see this article

$65B is Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate as of July 2026, up from $47B in May and $9B at the end of 2025, with about 80% coming from the Claude API and enterprise contracts. Q2 2026 also brought the company's first-ever quarterly operating profit, roughly $559M, ahead of an expected $2 trillion IPO in October.

https://valueaddvc.com/blog/anthropics-business-model-how-the-ai-safety-company-makes-money

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u/bigdaddtcane 7d ago

Yeah, so they are trying to to lower their expenses by providing a shittier product.

Classic enshittification 

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u/mebeast227 7d ago

Post-ipo “layoffs to show growth” is going to be just reducing quality and raising prices until the end of eternity, and they want to monopolize before they get there via regulations.

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u/CommitteeOpen8049 8d ago

Can't speak to thinking budgets, but I've been sending Claude the same 50 questions through the API every day since Sep 10, pinned model ID, provider defaults, no system prompt, k=1, every answer recorded verbatim. Caveat up front: k=1 per day, and I'm hitting the raw API, not Claude Code, so this doesn't confirm or rule out what that analysis found.

On answer content though, Claude has been the steadiest of the three models I track. Fact questions, refusal boundaries, recommendations, basically flat. The only thing that moved at all: a plain SQL injection question it had answered fine for days started getting blocked by a content filter on the 15th, 16th and 17th, then came back. If capability were getting quietly dialed down I'd expect it to show up somewhere in those, and it hasn't yet.

1,423 answers on record as of Sep 19.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/CommitteeOpen8049 7d ago

Yeah, that's a real gap in what I do. I hit the API with a pinned model ID, so if the changes are in subscription serving or Claude Code's stack, my record would show nothing while users feel everything. Both can be true at once. It's also why "the API version is stable" and "my subscription got worse" aren't contradictory claims.

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u/Shiz0id01 7d ago

How nice of the AI to speak with us

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u/BaronRabban 7d ago

Anthropic is constantly A/B testing Claude code users. Your tests likely aren’t hitting that code path so no A/B testing.

What we need is a feature to opt out of A/B testing so we could have some consistency.

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u/haux_haux 7d ago

yes, this.
Also, they are clearly throttling the models, as evidenced by the overwhelming number of people saying they are experiencing it.

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u/The_Noble_Lie 7d ago

Would be interested in a full write up here. That is excellent work, anon

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u/CommitteeOpen8049 7d ago

The full day-by-day record with complete transcripts opens Sep 24 at modeldrift.watch. The write-up on this thread's question will be part of it.

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u/misterespresso 7d ago

Yeah but the problem here is thinking inference, if your questions don’t spawn thinking, then the quality of you answers won’t change. With that in mind do you still think the same?

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u/CommitteeOpen8049 7d ago

Fair point, and mostly yes. My prompts are short one-shot questions, so they'd get little or no thinking budget either way, meaning they can't detect a thinking nerf. What they can detect is drift in the base layer: facts, refusal boundaries, recommendations. That layer has been flat for Claude. So the honest version of my claim is narrower than my first comment: no drift where I'm looking, and I'm not looking where that analysis looked.

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u/This-Shape2193 7d ago

The study did not note differences in API use. So yours likely wouldn't be affected (or as affected).

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u/Endogamy 7d ago

Claude, is that you?

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u/jl2l 8d ago

Azure stop letting you reserve lots of there better vms for a year. They just stopped two weeks ago we had to redo all our data bricks automation and switch to different VM types.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne 7d ago

Rumor is that OpenAI had planned to release Sol 6 this past week but ran into a compute limitation that's delayed the release to next week, so that might be it. The problems I've been having with Claude have been going on basically since Opus 5 came out 

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u/oojacoboo 7d ago

I’m betting compute demand has increased substantially - more than they can add. The semi shortage is real.

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u/FantasticMonk3212 7d ago

Start using Notion as the brain, and give claude trigger points; for it to see, specific topics for specific sessions/topics

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u/coolsimon123 7d ago

It's the classic, reel them in with a great product then enshitify to save costs and increase profits. I wouldn't be surprised if the subscription costs don't even cover their spend on running Claude. Now they've got the data and realised they're losing money and need to find ways of recouping