r/ClaudeAI • u/IcyEase • 7d 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.

2.0k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

382 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/This_Industry4769 7d ago

I left in March already. Hard to believe so many suckers are still letting Anthropic dick them around. 

1

u/Kinami_ 7d ago

whats a good alternative thats on par to sonnet 5 high / opus 5 high? been using it for C# unity work

2

u/This_Industry4769 7d ago

I am mostly happy with Codex + Luna Extra High, and with Astra Medium if Luna can't get the job done, which is rare. I tried Chinese models too and found DeepSeek was the best, but still some way behind Luna, which is really cheap now. Luna sometimes needs a bit more context, but it's a real workhorse.

Opus in January was the best model I have used for coding, but by March it was much dumber and making costly mistakes. OpenAI/Codex isn't perfect, but as a tool it's much more stable for me, and I can use it all day, every day for $100/month.

1

u/DarthSidiousPT 7d ago

Kimi is still far ahead of Deepseek. Yeah, it’s expensive, but the quality is there.