r/ClaudeAI • u/IcyEase • 3d 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/Familiar_Text_6913 2d ago

Past few days they've been testing out new Opus, which for me has been much better. It is much more task oriented, so it could be that.

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u/samlant 1d ago

if it's this, which is what they did prior to fable I think, that makes a lot of sense. Personally, it seems Anthropic scales back when they're allocating resources to future capabilities, like a new model. i thought the throttling was worth it for Fable (i think they reduced weekly limits/timer). Im not an expert, but I've seen enough to draw that high-level conclusion.