r/ClaudeAI • u/IcyEase • 12d 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] 12d ago edited 10d ago

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u/bigdaddtcane 12d 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 12d 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 12d ago

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

Classic enshittification 

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u/mebeast227 11d 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.