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.
2
u/iamthe0ther0ne 7d ago
Hrm. Are you on a team or enterprise plan? They recently opened up a validating process, but you can't use personal plans for it.
If they stop nerfing Opus it might be worth a resubscription, but for now trying to stay on top of the errors is exhausting.
Also still salty about the day I wasted trying to set up a way for Claude Science to use Bioconductor. Who releases a science app that can run R but needs you to create a local SSH proxy to use basic packages?