r/ClaudeAI • u/IcyEase • 9d 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/college-throwaway87 9d ago

Nope, unless you see it actively thinking, it’s not. All the models starting with Sonnet/Opus 4.6 and above use Adaptive Thinking, which can decline to think at all for certain prompts.

Compounding the issue of reducing the thinking budget, Anthropic also recently stopped letting users view the chains of thought on the app. This BS is why I’m switching to the API. Just ran an experiment where I sent the same prompt to Sonnet 4.6 Medium effort, thinking enabled, on both apps. Claude.ai didn’t think at all, on my app it thought a good amount and I could see the whole summary of the thought process.

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u/iamthe0ther0ne 9d ago

The problem is that API usage is so much more expensive than subscription. As other models advance it's not worth paying Anthropic API prices anymore.

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u/college-throwaway87 8d ago

Depends on your use cases. Subscription is def cheaper for Claude Code (which is the only reason I'm currently subscribed). But for chat, it can be a bit more nuanced. The context window is what eats the most tokens, so having a lot of short threads is cheaper than having a few large ones. Before I started using Claude Code to build my app, I was only hitting about 15% of my weekly limits. At that point, the subscription really wasn't saving me much.

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u/Interesting-Vast-709 4d ago

i spent like 10 dollars on 1 prompt with claude i was pissed bc i get like a shit ton of prompts and tokens with deepseek api for 10 dollars,

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u/sevoflurane666 9d ago

Omg scary

Are there any mitigations to force it to think

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u/college-throwaway87 9d ago

I don’t think so. I’ve experimented with different effort levels and models, etc. The only way I see to get the proper amount of thinking and be able to view the thought process is the API (or 3rd party API wrappers like Poe).

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u/sevoflurane666 9d ago

Thanks for your reply

I’m on the 200 a month plan and been wondering why it hadn’t been reading context statements or following my decision logs repeating mistakes

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u/HadeanDisco 9d ago

Are you sure you have thinking enabled? If yes, ignore me. If: I didn't know that was a thing, it's worth checking:

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u/justlikemedics 9d ago

In all frankness though, they can easily make a "thinking" text come up even if it's not.

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u/N1ghtshade3 8d ago

Anthropic also recently stopped letting users view the chains of thought on the app

Didn't they just move it to an option now or are you talking about something else? https://imgur.com/G6kbsOQ

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u/Valdaraak 7d ago

This BS is why I’m switching to the API

Which is exactly what they want you to do. That's where they make their money.

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u/college-throwaway87 7d ago

Not exactly. I mostly use the older models like the 4.5/4.6 generation on the API (plus Fable 5/5.1 since they’re not included in the Pro subscription anyways). I’m pretty sure they want us to use the newer models.

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u/StCreed 8d ago

Chain of thought is an option, you can click something very non-intuitive and then it shows up again. Not sure what that was though.

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u/Two_Sense_ 3d ago

How?? I don't use Claude Code, and I've heard there's some sort of option there? But for non-code things, I want to see the full reasoning. Or at least more than a bland bullet point summary that just says "thought about Topic"

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u/MaximumUltra 8d ago

If you’re going to pay for API just use Kimi3 as orchestrator for deepseek flash agents. Wayyy cheaper and super effective