Anthropic's AI downgrade stings power users
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Anthropic users across online forums are raising the same complaint: Claude suddenly feels ... bad.
Why it matters: The backlash lands just as Anthropic is testing a more powerful model, Mythos — raising questions about whether cutting-edge AI is becoming less accessible even as it gets more capable.
Driving the news: Over the past few weeks, users on X, GitHub and Reddit have been swapping anecdotes, benchmarks and prompts in an effort to pinpoint what changed and why.
- "Claude has regressed to the point it cannot be trusted to perform complex engineering," an AMD senior director wrote in a widely shared post on GitHub.
- Others have posted side-by-side outputs and benchmarks they say show Claude generating answers that are less accurate or nuanced.
- Much of the speculation centers on whether Claude has been deliberately scaled back — what users are calling "nerfed" — either to control costs or to redirect scarce compute toward Mythos and other frontier efforts.
The other side: Anthropic says it adjusted the default level of reasoning in Claude Code, but denies the changes were tied to compute constraints or Mythos.
- When asked about the online complaints, Anthropic pointed Axios to a post on X from Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, from March 6.
- "You can change it anytime in the /model selector if you prefer low effort (faster) or high effort (more intelligence). The setting is sticky and will persist for your next session," Cherny said.
Between the lines: Analyst Patrick Moorhead decided to ask Claude to weigh in.
- "Anthropic made real configuration changes that objectively reduced default thinking depth across all surfaces including claude.ai, but the most extreme 'secret nerfing' narrative overstates what happened," Claude said as part of its lengthy response.
Another theory is that users aren't seeing decline so much as acclimating to what previously felt magical.
- Over time, expectations rise and flaws become more noticeable — a phenomenon known as habituation.
Yes, but: Even if the change is explainable, the perception problem is real — especially for power users relying on consistent performance for coding and research workflows.
The big picture: The fight over Claude's "intelligence" points to a broader shift: access to top-tier AI is fragmenting.
- Advanced capabilities are increasingly gated behind higher-cost tiers, API usage or experimental programs.
- Anthropic is also reportedly close to upgrading its high-end Opus model to version 4.7.
The increasing stratification could lead to a division between those who can afford to pay top dollar for the best models and those who can't.
- Anthropic recently moved large enterprise customers to a fully usage-based (token) pricing model, tying intelligence more directly to spend.
- It's also reinforcing a widening divide between power users and dabblers around AI's capabilities.
What we're watching: Whether "default" AI experiences continue to get worse even as frontier systems get dramatically stronger.
