Anthropic downgraded cache TTL on March 6th

(github.com)

214 points | by lsdmtme 8 hours ago

29 comments

  • sunaurus 5 hours ago
    Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes.

    I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.

    • andai 4 hours ago
      Well, off the top of my head:

      - Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics)

      - Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto)

      (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

      - Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD))

      - Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex.

      - Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc.

      It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

      I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.

      • rlpb 4 hours ago
        > It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".

        I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?

        • stingraycharles 1 hour ago
          It’s more that Anthropic knows that the models themselves are non-sticky, and the real moat is in the ecosystem around it.

          It only makes sense for them to get users to use their ecosystem, rather than other tools.

        • sshine 2 hours ago
          > Perhaps Anthropic is struggling to meet demand?

          Yes, definitely, they’re gracefully failing to meet demand. They could also deny new customers, but it would probably be bad for business.

      • joshstrange 4 hours ago
        > (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)

        100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.

        • stingraycharles 1 hour ago
          In this case, they handled things pretty well. You can still use openclaw etc with your regular Anthropic subscription, it will just count towards your extra credits / usage which you can buy for a 30% discount compared to API pricing. And they gave everyone one month’s value in credits.

          I don’t think they could have done that much better I’d say.

          • cedws 27 minutes ago
            That does not address joshstrange's concerns.

            There is very poor clarity about what is and isn't allowed with the Claude SDK/claude -p. Are we allowed to use it to automate stuff? What kind of tasks is it permitted to be used for? What if you call your script 'OrangeClaw' and release that on GitHub? What if your script gets super popular, does it suddenly become against TOS?

      • fluidcruft 1 hour ago
        claude -p not working would be instant unsubscribe downgrade from Max to Pro and further drive my use of codex. I use both but overall have noticed I reach for Claude less than codex lately because claude keeps getting slower and slower (I have not noticed a drop off in quality, but I use it less and less so maybe I'm not in a good position to notice).

        Generally I find codex and claude make a good team. I'm not a heavy user, but I am currently Claude Max 5x and ChatGPT Plus. Now that OpenAI has a $100 offering and I am finding myself using Claude less, I am considering switching to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Pro x5. The work hours restriction on Claude Max x5 really pisses me off.

        I am not a heavy user. Historically I only break over 50% weekly one week a month and average about 30-40% of Max x5 over the entire month. I went Max because of the weekly limits and to access the better models and because I felt I was getting value. I need an occasional burst of usage, not 24/7 slow compute. But even for pay-as-you-go burst usage Anthropic's API prices are insane vs Max.

        I have yet to ever hit a limit on codex so it's not on my mind. And lately it seems like Claude is likely to be having a service interruption anyway. A big part of subscribing to Claude Max was to get away from how the usage limits on Pro were causing me to architect my life around 5hr windows. And now Anthropic has brought that all back with this don't use it before 2pm bullshit. I want things ready to go when the muses strike. I'm honestly questioning whether Anthropic wants anyone who isn't employed as a software engineer to use their kit.

        Anyway for the last month or so codex "just works" and Claude has been an invitation for annoyances. There was a time when codex was quite a bit behind claude-code. They have been roughly equal (different strength and weaknesses) since at least February (for me).

      • politelemon 4 hours ago
        Why were third party harnesses banned? Surely they'd want sticking power over the ecosystem.
        • cedws 4 hours ago
          There’s the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code to use the models efficiently, which the subscription pricing is based on.

          Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.

          • Zetaphor 3 hours ago
            Alternatively products like openclaw have an outsized impact on Anthropic's infrastructure for essentially no benefit to them. Especially when you're taking advantage of the $200 plan.

            OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of cash to try and capture a little more market share. They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.

        • sshine 2 hours ago
          One thing is lack of control of token efficiency on what’s already a subsidised product.

          Another thing is branding: Their CLI might be the best right now, but tech debt says it won’t continue to be for very long.

          By enforcing the CLI you enforce the brand value — you’re not just buying the engine.

          • thepasch 1 hour ago
            Claude Code was the best harness from roughly around release to January this year. Ever since then, it's become more and more bloated with more and more stuff and seemingly no coherent plan or vision to it all other than "let's see what else that sounds cool we can cram in there."
            • justin_dash 1 hour ago
              What's taken over since then? Codex or something else?
          • olejorgenb 1 hour ago
            Maybe they should fix bugs like this then https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/17979#issue... ...
        • brookst 1 hour ago
          To be clear they weren’t banned from Claude usage, they were required to use the API and API rates rather than Claude Max tokens.

          Claude code uses a bunch if best practices to maximize cache hit rate. Third party harnesses are hit or miss, so often use a lot more tokens for the same task.

          • ledauphin 1 hour ago
            nah this doesn't explain it.

            most of the users of those third party harnesses care just as much about hitting cache and getting more usage.

            • SyneRyder 1 hour ago
              I'm watching a conference talk right now from 2 weeks ago: "I Hated Every Coding Agent So I Built My Own - Mario Zechner (Pi)", and in the middle he directly references this.

              He demonstrates in the code that OpenCode aggressively trims context, by compacting on every turn, and pruning all tool calls from the context that occurred more than 40,000 tokens ago. Seems like it could be a good strategy to squeeze more out of the context window - but by editing the oldest context, it breaks the prompt cache for the entire conversation. There is effectively no caching happening at all.

              https://youtu.be/Dli5slNaJu0

          • lacunary 1 hour ago
            but claude -p is still Claude Code
            • danmaz74 1 hour ago
              Was something using that been banned?
              • SyneRyder 1 hour ago
                Yep, that's the reason for the new Extra Credit feature in Claude Code. Some people were wiring up "Claude -p" with OpenClaw, so now Anthropic detects if the system prompt contains the phrase OpenClaw, and bills from Extra Credit if that happens:

                https://x.com/steipete/status/2040811558427648357

                "Anthropic now blocks first-party harness use too

                claude -p --append-system-prompt 'A personal assistant running inside OpenClaw.' 'is clawd here?'

                → 400 Third-party apps now draw from your extra usage, not your plan limits.

                So yeah: bring your own coin "

        • klempner 1 hour ago
          Note that the thing that's banned is using third party harnesses with their subscription based pricing.

          If you're paying normal API prices they'll happily let you use whatever harness you want.

      • esperent 4 hours ago
        > claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked

        I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet.

        I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else.

        But claude -p is fine.

        ... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?

        • andai 3 hours ago
          The other day I read that letting another agent invoke claude -p was considered a violation (i.e. letting OpenClaw delegate to Claude Code).

          Not sure how that's enforced though. I was in OpenClaw discord a while ago and enforcement seemed a bit random.

          I'll try to find the source, I might have gotten the details mixed up.

          • jeremyjh 1 hour ago
            It’s not a “violation” but they said it would be charged as extra usage.
            • zackify 1 hour ago
              This is a funny cat and mouse game. They offer a built in loop command.

              Just tmux and use that.

              Soon if they drop -p people will just vibe code in 5 minutes a way to type inside it remotely similar to their own built in remote access tool. Seems like a losing game from anthropics side

      • risyachka 4 hours ago
        >> apparently a bug?

        it's a bug only if they get a harsh public response, otherwise it becomes a feature

    • zazibar 4 hours ago
      A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning through too many tokens.

      Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.

      • derangedHorse 3 hours ago
        Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context.

        It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.

        • christoph 3 hours ago
          A good lesson for all - I always really liked the Picasso version:

          In a bustling restaurant, an excited patron recognized the famous artist Picasso dining alone. Seizing the moment, the patron approached Picasso with a simple request. With a plain napkin and a big smile, he asked the artist for a drawing. He promised payment for his troubles. Picasso, ever the creator, didn’t hesitate. From his pocket, he produced a charcoal pencil and he brought to life a stunning sketch of a goat on the napkin—a clear mark of his unique style. Proudly, he presented it to the patron.

          The artwork mesmerized the patron, who reached out to take it, only to be stopped by Picasso’s firm hand. “That will be $100,000,” Picasso declared.

          Astonished, the patron balked at the sum. “But it took you just a few seconds to draw this!”

          With a calm demeanor, Picasso took back the napkin, crumpled it, and tucked it away into his pocket, replying, “No, it has taken me a lifetime.”

          • airstrike 1 hour ago
            Good story but not applicable at all
      • groundzeros2015 1 hour ago
        I can’t believe how many small to mid size companies are being destroyed by bad decisions like this.

        A friend’s company fired all EMs and have engineers reporting to product managers. They aren’t allowed to do refactors because the CTO believes the AI doesn’t need organized code.

      • kubb 1 hour ago
        He must be feeling pretty good, after all he still believes that it was the right call, and he definitely won't be admitting a mistake.

        There's 0 chance of him facing the consequences for it either.

      • dickersnoodle 4 hours ago
        Hopefully that EVP feels embarrassed that a big bet was made that not only didn't pay off but left the company in a worse position. Some schadenfreude may be all you can expect, since this is an executive.
      • sgt 1 hour ago
        But cancelling IDE subscriptions? You need a proper IDE to along side AI augmented development unless you want to simply be along for the ride.
        • derwiki 53 minutes ago
          Free VS Code is probably fine
    • swasheck 10 minutes ago
      it has been my go-to provider for things but i noticed extraordinarily high usage rate last month on a little side project i started so that i could learn about things that are interesting to me while helping my day to day responsibilities (creating an iceberg data lake from my existing parquet files). i used my month’s worth of corporate subscription allocated tokens in 3 days. never seen that before so now i’m a lot more apprehensive about getting into the weeds with claude but i’m also so much less impressed with the other available models for work in this domain.
    • matheusmoreira 5 hours ago
      I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale "no wait" and undoing everything until it ends up right where it started with nothing to show for it after 100k tokens spent.

      Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an elaborate OpenAI psyop.

    • jakobnissen 5 hours ago
      Yeah I’ve seen this too. It’s difficult for me to tell if the complaints are due to a legitimate undisclosed nerf of Claude, or whether it’s just the initial awe of Opus 4.6 fading and people increasingly noticing its mistakes.
      • babaganoosh89 4 hours ago
        It's not just you, there is a github issue for it: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/42796
      • PunchyHamster 5 hours ago
        Both can be a thing at same time
      • iLoveOncall 5 hours ago
        I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're missing.

        It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products.

        That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.

        • javawizard 5 hours ago
          The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen, know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic with this comment?

          (FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm definitely not an Anthropic employee.)

          • felixgallo 1 hour ago
            https://isitnerfed.org/

            in short, it looks like nothing has been nerfed, but sentiment has definitely been negative. I suspect some of the openclaw users have been taking out their frustrations.

            • javawizard 1 hour ago
              That's fascinating.

              Any idea what their test harness looks like? My experience comes primarily from Claude Code; this makes me wonder if recent CC updates could be more to blame than Opus 4.6 itself.

          • iLoveOncall 4 hours ago
            Oh it's pretty clear to me that Anthropic employs the same tactics and uses bots on socials to push its products too. On Reddit a couple of months ago it was simply unbearable with all the "Claude Opus is going to take all the jobs".

            You definitely shouldn't trust me, as we're way beyond the point where you can trust ANYTHING on the internet that has a timestamp later than 2021 or so (and even then, of course people were already lying).

            Personally I use Claude models through Bedrock because I work for Amazon, and I haven't noticed any decline. Instead it's always been pretty shit, and what people describe now as the model getting lost of infinite loops of talking to itself happened since the very start for me.

        • hirako2000 5 hours ago
          Judging from the number of GitHub issues on Anthropic, shamelessly being dismissed as "fixed", I doubt openai needs the bots to tarnish that competitor.
      • kingkongjaffa 5 hours ago
        Just one more anecdote:

        I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage.

        In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results.

        Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation.

        This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.

        • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 5 hours ago
          Whenever I see Opus say “but wait, …”—which is all the time—I get a little bit closer toward throwing my computer out the window. Sometimes I just collapse the thinking section, cross my fingers, and wait for the answer. It’s too frustrating watching the thinking process.
          • natpalmer1776 1 hour ago
            I stop the thinking and manually correct with explicit instructions or direction. I treat my agents like well meaning ivy-league graduate interns. They lack the experience to know what to do sometimes and need a “common sense” direction every now and then.
        • adahn 4 hours ago
          I’ve seen the point raised elsewhere that this could be the double usage promo that was available from the 13th of March to the 28th. ie. people getting used to the promo then feeling impacted when it finished.

          Although it seems that enterprise wasn’t included, so maybe not in your case.

          https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...

          • cyanydeez 4 hours ago
            its sounds like, tinfoil hat, they reduced the quant size of their model and tried to mask the change with the promo. your theory only addresses the spend not the reduced realiability
          • derangedHorse 3 hours ago
            [dead]
        • derangedHorse 3 hours ago
          It's probably because you didn't specify "make no mistakes" /s

          In all seriousness though, I've observed the same thing with my own usage.

    • pxtail 5 hours ago
      There's still plenty of "leave my fellow multbillion corp alone" type ones,it means that corp can and should screw it's loving customer base harder.
      • simianwords 5 hours ago
        The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the point where it is shoehorned into every single place possible.

        It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.

        • officialchicken 4 hours ago
          The investors are their customers - not the users of the end-product.
          • simianwords 4 hours ago
            This shows a lack of understanding of how markets work. Investors make money when the valuation of the company increases. The valuation of the company is the best prediction of future profit risk adjusted.

            How would anthropic increase future profits without satisfying customers?

            • jeremyjh 1 hour ago
              Early investors make money when later investors buy them out at inflated valuations.
            • cowboylowrez 2 hours ago
              Well sure, all market signals should be considered. As a casual observer, my received signals have been indicating that AI is getting sold at a loss to get market share, and more recent signals have indicated that users are really really sensitive to both costs and performance.

              The weakest signal to me is investor money, because when you think of it, investors are betting on a future that may or may not be there. Heck even trends aren't guaranteed, "past performance is no guarantee etc etc"

            • bitwize 3 hours ago
              Have you seen the business models for these companies? Literal underpants gnome memes. OpenAI's goes like this:

              1. Build AGI

              2. Use said AGI to tell us how to become profitable

              3. Profit!

              Anthropic seems to be going all in on enterprise sales. Which means they don't actually have to please customers, or it's what ThePrimeagen humorously calls a "yacht problem"—a problem that only needs a solution after the IPO. For now all they have to do is convince corporate leadership that this is the future of work and sow enough FOMO to close those sales contracts and their projected sales, and stock valuation, goes through the roof.

              Of course that value will collapse if they go without delivering on their promises long enough. That's why they call it a bubble. But by then, hopefully, Dario and the early investors will be long gone and even richer than they were to start. Their only competitor, OpenAI, is confronted with the same issues: the scalability problems won't go away, and addressing them doesn't drive stock valuation the way promising high rollers that AGI and total workforce automation are just around the corner does.

        • georgemcbay 2 hours ago
          It doesn't matter if it is in Anthropic's interest to screw its customer base, if their reported monthly revenue growth is accurate then it makes perfect sense why Claude would be getting dumber...

          Demand is way up and compute supply is extremely limited because data center buildouts can't keep up with demand.

          In the face of rising demand and insufficient compute their only practical options (other than refusing new business until demand can be met) are signicantly raising the price of tokens (and more tighly limiting subscription options) or doing behind the scenes inference optimizations that are likely to make the model dumber.

          It is very easy to believe that they took the route of inference optimizations that have reduced quality of the service and that that is where the perceived enshittification is coming from.

    • ruler88 32 minutes ago
      Anthropic seems to be playing the giant-tech-rent-capture game that all of the old guards have done for the past few years. We thought that the new age of AI might bring some fresh air into the mix, but I guess that optimism quickly faded.
    • nojs 1 hour ago
      My working theory is that all models are approximately the same, and the variance in quality mostly depends on how long they think for.

      So the trick is to always set to max, and then begin every task with “this is an extremely complex task, do not complete it without extensive deep thinking and research” or whatever.

      You’re basically fighting a battle to make the model think more, against the defaults getting more and more nerfed to save costs.

    • drzaiusx11 1 hour ago
      At some point these AI companies need to pay the piper as it were and actually provide a return for their investors. Expect cost cutting attempts to continue unless backlash is great enough to pose an existential threat to these companies.
    • AznHisoka 1 hour ago
      Its not just engineers, and its not just about the 3rd party/rate limiting stuff. I feel like the reasoning capabilities have deteriorated too for non-coding tasks.
    • oezi 4 hours ago
      On OpenRouter token consumption is up 5x since November 2025. If this is indicative of the industries growth then I can't fathom how we will not hit resource constraints.
    • faangguyindia 3 hours ago
      This is actually great feature, you can do bait and switch with AI.
    • stavros 1 hour ago
      It feels like I'm getting less and less for my money every day. A few weeks ago I was programming all week and never getting close to the limit, yesterday half my weekly limit went away in a day. Changing the limits mid-subscription is just theft.
    • echelon 5 hours ago
      Anthropic isn't your friend.

      Phase 1: $200/mo prosumer engineer tool

      Phase 2: AI layoffs / "it's just AI washing"

      Phase 3: $20,000/mo limited release model "too dangerous" to use

      Phase 4: Accelerated layoffs / two person teams. Rehiring of certain personnel at lower costs.

      Phase 5: "Our new model can decompile and rewrite any commercial software. We just wrote a new kernel after looking at Linux (bye, bye GPL!) We also decompiled the latest Zelda game, ported the engine to Rust, and made a new game with it. Source code has no value. Even compiled and obfuscated code is a breeze to clone."

      Phase 6: $100k/mo model that replicates entire engineering teams, only large companies can afford it. Ordinary users can't buy. More layoffs.

      Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

      Anothropic used to be cool before they started gating access. Limiting Claw/OpenCode was strike one. Mythos is strike two.

      Y'all should have started hating on their ethics when they started complaining about being distilled. For training they conducted on materials they did not own.

      We need open weights companies now more than ever. Too bad China seems to be giving up on the idea.

      "You wouldn't distill an Opus."

      • PunchyHamster 5 hours ago
        Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.

        You will be backstabbed

        You will be squeezed for all they can.

        And you will be betrayed.

        > Phase N: People can't afford computing anymore. Everything is thin clients and rented. It's become like the private railroad industry. End of the PC era. Like kids growing up on smartphones, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

        Thankfully none of them actually makes money and just runs on investment so there is a good chance bubble will drop and the price of PC equipment will... continue to rise as US gives up Taiwan to China

        • dns_snek 1 hour ago
          > Stop thinking billion dollar publicly traded companies are "cool" just because they make widget you like.

          Anthropic is a private company but nevertheless, the sentiment is accurate and applies to all kinds of corporations.

      • andai 4 hours ago
        What I want to know is how did they make the only LLM that doesn't sound cringe?

        I think it has something to do with mode collapse (although Claude certainly has its own "tells"), but I'm not sure.

        It sounds trivial but even for Agentic, I found the writing style to be really important. When you give Claude a persona, it sounds like the thing. When you give GPT a persona, it sounds like GPT half-assedly pretending to be the thing.

        ---

        Some other interesting points about Anthropic's models. I don't know if any of these relate to my LLM style question, but seems worth mentioning:

        Claude models also use way less tokens for the same task (on ArtificialAnalysis, they are a clear outlier on this metric).

        And there's a much stronger common sense, subjectively. (Not sure if we have a good way to actually measure that, though.) It takes context and common sense into account, to a much greater degree.

        (Which ties in with their constitution. Understanding why things are wrong at a deeper level, rather than just surface level pattern matching.)

        Opus is great but it should be bigger. You notice the difference between Sonnet and Opus, but with heavy use you notice Opus's limitations, too.

      • jhancock 5 hours ago
        What leads you to say China AI is giving up on open weights?

        I've been using GLM for over 6 months and pretty happy.

        • PunchyHamster 4 hours ago
          Why would any company release open weights once the investment money stops ?

          Releasing open weights have been basically a PR move, the moment those companies need to actually make money they will cut it out as that reduces their client base.

          They DO NOT want you to run AI. They want you to pay them to do it

          • Zetaphor 3 hours ago
            Minimax just released a new model yesterday. You're conflating one company with a countries entire industry. There's more than just Qwen coming out of China.
          • jhancock 4 hours ago
            ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know.

            z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies.

            I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).

          • cyanydeez 4 hours ago
            open weights is a way to nerf your opponent and is meaningless to your business if you need to retrain a model because your trailing

            So, it makes a lot of sense to get people a "demo" and claim the paid product is better.

            i think a lot of people have no idea how capable local models are atm.

            • jeremyjh 1 hour ago
              Two years ago a lot of people thought GPT-4o was usable for software development. I didn’t really find that to be the case in general but certainly it could do a lot of useful things. And now Qwen3.5-8B is just as capable and runs fine on an M2 MacBook Air.
        • Zetaphor 3 hours ago
          People keep repeating this without any real thought behind it because of the high profile resignations on the Qwen team. Meanwhile the Minimax team just released a new open weights version of their 229B model yesterday. So much for that narrative.

          The AI landscape in China is larger than just Qwen and Alibaba.

          • dns_snek 1 hour ago
            Of course, but for how long? Do you think that companies will keep giving away valuable assets for free forever, or do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?

            The first one is just incredibly naive, the second might be true for some people, for some tasks, but it's not going to capture the majority who're chasing the latest and greatest to "keep up".

            • Throaway199999 1 hour ago
              the asset's value is in being released, so yes
      • hirako2000 4 hours ago
        Good read on the situation.

        It all boils down to a brilliant but extremely expensive technology. Both to build and to run.

        We've been sold a product with heavy subsidy. The idea (from Sam) scale out and see what happens.

        Those who care to read between the lines can see what's happening. A perfect storm of demand that attract VCs who can't understand they are the real customers. Once they understand that it will be too late.

        Regarding open weight models: eventually we will, as humanity, benefit from the astronomical capital poured into developing a technology ahead of its time. In a few years this and even more will run on edge.

        Written by open source developers, likely former openai and anthropic employees who got so much cash in the bank they don't need to worry about renting their knowledge.

      • marcus_cemes 5 hours ago
        > We need open weights companies now more than ever.

        If you're objective it to democratize AI, sure. But for those fed up with it and the devastating effects it's having on students, for example, can opt to actively avoid paying for products with AI (I say this as someone who uses it every day, guilty). At some point large companies will see that they're bleeding money for something that most people don't seem to want, and cancel those $100k/mo deals. I've already experienced one AI-developer-turned company crash and burn.

        Personally, I don't think this LLM-based AI generation will have any significant positive impacts. Time, energy (CO2) and money would have been far better spent elsewhere.

      • magic_hamster 5 hours ago
        > End of the PC era, there's nothing to tinker with anymore. And certainly no gradient for entrepreneurship for once-skilled labor capital.

        This one seems too far fetched. Training models is widespread. There will always be open weight models in some form, and if we assume there will be some advancements in architecture, I bet you could also run them on much leaner devices. Even today you can run models on Raspberry Pis. I don't see a reason this will stop being a thing, there will be plenty of ways to tinker.

        However, keep in mind the masses don't care about tinkering and never have. People want a ChatGPT experience, not a pytorch experience. In essence this is true for all tech products, not just AI.

      • simianwords 5 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • PunchyHamster 4 hours ago
          New theory: every post to HN will be about LLM or other AI. Or written by one. Usually both
        • gib444 5 hours ago
          New theory of HN: every post on LLMs will attract the "what is wrong with AI? I don't get it [even though I've posted to HN every day for weeks/months on LLM/AI topics]. Please enlighten me" types
    • felixgallo 1 hour ago
    • estimator7292 2 hours ago
      I can't believe how quickly they went from riding high on anti-OpenAI sentiment post-DOD fiasco, to shooting themselves and all their users new and old in the foot.

      The ideal time to make your product worse is probably not at the same point that all of your competitor's customers are looking. Anthropic really, really fucked up here.

      And beyond that, there's a ton of people who are just regular 9-5 Claude CLI users with an enterprise subscription who are getting punished with a worse model at the same price just as if we were Claw users. This kind of thing does not make one feel warm and fuzzy. I feel like I just got a boot to the teeth.

      • jeremyjh 1 hour ago
        The hypothesis that makes the most sense is not that they are idiots, but that they have no choice. They cannot meet the new demand. So they’ve quantized the model.
  • cassianoleal 6 hours ago
    The title should be changed. It makes it look like they upped the TTL from 1 h to 5 months.

    The SI symbol for minutes is "min", not "M".

    A compromise would be to use the OP notation "m".

    • PontifexMinimus 5 hours ago
      I agree. My first reaction was "what the fuck's an 'M'?"
      • isoprophlex 3 hours ago
        Five million. No matter the unit, just, 5.000.000
    • jeltz 5 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • wafflemaker 5 hours ago
        >This is only an issue for people who do not know months are longer than hours.

        I'm aware of that, and thought that "downgraded" was the wrong word to use when going from 1h to 5 months.

      • lunar_rover 5 hours ago
        Whether a longer or shorter cache TTL is considered a downgrade depends on the context, so the title is ambiguous to laymen.
      • cassianoleal 5 hours ago
        I'm not sure upping a cache TTL from 1 h to 5 months is an upgrade in most contexts.
      • zeroCalories 5 hours ago
        Several thoughts went through my head before I realized what's wrong:

        1. I guess longer caching means more stale data, which is why it's a downgrade? 2. Maybe this isn't the TTL I thought it was? 3. Maybe this isn't the cache I thought?

        Then I clicked on the link and realized I had been mislead my the title.

      • croes 5 hours ago
        This is an issue for LLMs learning from HN data
  • albert_e 1 hour ago
    So a side effect of this is -- even at 1 hour caching -- ...

    If you run out of session quota too quickly and need to wait more than an hour to resume your work ... you are paying even more penalty just to resume your work -- a penalty you wouldnt have needed if session quota was not so restrictive in first place, and which in turn causes you to burn through next session quota even faster.

    Seems like a vicious cycle that made the UX very poor. I remember Claude Code with Pro became virtually unuseable in middle of March with session quota expiring within first hour or less for me -- which was wildly different experience from early March.

  • hirako2000 1 hour ago
    There is a chef, he opens a restaurant. Delicious food.

    It costs him more in ingredients alone than he charges. He even offers some pseudo unlimited buffet, combo sets, and happy hours.

    He announced a new restaurant, apparently it will be even better, so good he's a bit worried. He makes sure to share his worries while he picks a few select enterprise for business parties and the likes.

    In the meantime he cracks down on free buffet goers who happen to eat too much, and downgrades all ingredients without notice to finally hope to make a profit.

    • embedding-shape 12 minutes ago
      Pretty much capitalism in a nut shell, yeah.
  • disillusioned 5 hours ago
    It's also routinely failing the car wash question across all models now, which wasn't the case a month ago. :-/

    Seeing some things about how the effort selector isn't working as intended necessarily and the model is regressing in other ways: over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take, but quoted in human effort, or suggesting the "easier" path forward even if it's a hack or kludge-filled solution.

    • andai 3 hours ago
      > over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take

      I heard a while back Claude refused to attempt a task for days, saying it would take weeks of work. Eventually the user convinced it to try, and it one-shotted it in 30 seconds.

      • apetresc 1 hour ago
        For days? Someone spent days trying to convince Claude to do something?
        • layer8 1 hour ago
          If you asked yesterday, and asked again today, then you asked for days. OP might be trying to express that it wasn’t just a temporary fluke.
    • _blk 5 hours ago
      Awesome, I didn't know about the car wash question.

      Totally true, also tokens seem to burn through much faster. More parallelism could explain some of it but where I could work on 3-5 projects at once on the max plan a month ago, I can't even get one to completion now on the same Opus model before the 5h session locks me up..

  • layer8 54 minutes ago
    From the recent-ish Dwarkesh podcast, Anthropic seems to be wary about buying/building too much compute [0]. That probably means that they have to attempt to minimize compute usage when there is a surge in demand. Following the argument in the podcast, throwing more money after them, as some in this thread are suggesting, won’t solve the issue, at least not in the short term.

    [0] https://www.dwarkesh.com/i/187852154/004620-if-agi-is-immine...

  • davidkuennen 5 hours ago
    On slightly off topic note: Codex is absolutely fantastic right now. I'm constantly in awe since switching from Claude a week ago.
    • yukIttEft 4 hours ago
      I'm currently "working" on a toy 3d Vulkan Physx thingy. It has a simple raycast vehicle and I'm trying to replace it with the PhysX5 built in one (https://nvidia-omniverse.github.io/PhysX/physx/5.6.1/docs/Ve...)

      I point it to example snippets and webdocumentation but the code it gens won't work at all, not even close

      Opus4.6 is a tiny bit less wrong than Codex 5.4 xhigh, but still pretty useless.

      So, after reading all the success stories here and everywhere, I'm wondering if I'm holding it wrong or if it just can't solve everything yet.

      • neomantra 33 minutes ago
        While I’ve had tremendous success with Golang projects and Typescript Web Apps, when I tried to use Metal Mesh Shaders in January, both Codex and Claude both had issues getting it right.

        That sort of GPU code has a lot of concepts and machinery, it’s not just a syntax to express, and everything has to be just right or you will get a blank screen. I also use them differently than most examples; I use it for data viz (turning data into meshes) and most samples are about level of detail. So a double whammy.

        But once I pointed either LLM at my own previous work — the code from months of my prior personal exploration and battles for understanding, then they both worked much better. Not great, but we could make progress.

        I also needed to make more mini-harnesses / scaffolds for it to work through; in other words isolating its focus, kind of like test-driven development.

      • layer8 1 hour ago
        My impression is that it always comes down to how well what you’re trying to do pattern-matches the training set.
        • embedding-shape 10 minutes ago
          When it comes to agents like codex and CC it seems to come down to how well you can describe what you want to do, and how well you can steer it to create its own harness to troubleshoot/design properly. Once you have that down, I haven't found a lot of things you cannot do.
      • wg0 2 hours ago
        Most of the folks are building CRUD apps with AI and that works fine.

        What you're doing is more specialized and these models are useless there. It's not intelligence.

        Another NFT/Crypto era is upon us so no you're not holding it wrong.

      • lukan 4 hours ago
        " or if it just can't solve everything yet."

        Obviously it cannot. But if you give the AI enough hints, clear spec, clear documentation and remove all distracting information, it can solve most problems.

      • seba_dos1 3 hours ago
        It works somewhat well with trivial things. That's where most of these success stories are coming from.
    • vidarh 5 hours ago
      Codex has been good quality wise, but I hit limits on the Codex team subscription so quickly it's almost more hassle that it is worth.
    • toenail 5 hours ago
      I have also switched from claude to codex a few weeks ago. After deciding to let agents only do focused work I needed less context, and the work was easier to review. Then I realized codex can deliver the same quality, and it's paid through my subscription instead of per token.
    • lifty 5 hours ago
      I made this switch months ago, ChatGPT 5.4 being a smarter model, but I’ve had subjective feelings of degradation even on 5.4 lately. There’s a lot of growth in usage right now so not sure what kind of optimizations their doing at both companies
    • onion2k 4 hours ago
      I use Codex at home and Opus at work. They're both brilliant.
    • lores 5 hours ago
      I would switch to Codex, but Altman is such a naked sociopath and OpenAI so devoid of ethical business practices that I can't in good conscience. I'm not under any illusion that Anthropic is ethical, but it is so far a step up from OpenAI.
      • groundzeros2015 1 hour ago
        Enemy centered decision making
      • nh2 5 hours ago
        Cannot you use Codex (which is open source, unlike Claude Code) with Claude, even via Amazon Bedrock?
        • embedding-shape 8 minutes ago
          Codex with Anthrophic's models is not as good as using the models with the harness it was trained in mine for. Same goes vice-versa too.
      • bob1029 4 hours ago
        I'm with you on the ethical part, but everything is a spectrum. All the AI leadership are some shade of evil. There's no way the product would be effective if they weren't. I don't like that Sam Altman is a lunatic, but frankly they all are. I also recognize that these are massive companies filled with non shitty engineers who are actually responsible for a lot of the magic. Conflating one charlatan with the rest of it is a tragedy of nuance.
        • subscribed 2 hours ago
          Yeah, but there's distinct difference between "risks their company because they refuse to help with killing little kids" and "happily helping with genocide".

          One of these is better.

      • simianwords 5 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • emaro 5 hours ago
          There's not one thing that stands out, but he abandoned the entire core principles of OpenAI (took a 180), constantly lies to people and doesn't plan to stop.

          https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/04/13/sam-altman-may...

        • DonHopkins 5 hours ago
          Calling out sociopaths is not virtue signaling. You need to look in the mirror if you think there's something wrong with that kind of virtue.

          You know, you can just google his name yourself, don't you?

  • Tarcroi 7 hours ago
    This coincides with Anthropic's peak-hour announcement (March 26th). Could the throttling be partly a response to infrastructure load that was itself inflated by the TTL regression?
    • HauntingPin 6 hours ago
      It would be too fucking funny if this were the case. They're vibe coding their infrastructure and they vibe coded their response to the increased load.
      • KronisLV 5 hours ago
        You'd think they would have dashboards for all of this stuff, to easily notice any change in metrics and be able to track down which release was responsible for it.
        • HauntingPin 5 hours ago
          They probably do, then they pipe it into a bunch of Claude subagents and then you get the current mess.
  • perks_12 5 hours ago
    Just give us the option to get the quality back, Anthropic. I get that even a $200 subscription is not possible eventually, but give us the option to sub the $1000 tier or tell us to use the API tier, but give us some consistency.
    • jwr 1 hour ago
      This. I get much more value than 90€ from my Claude Code subscription. I am willing to pay more for consistency and not having to watch my back all the time, because I might get screwed over.
    • PunchyHamster 4 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • ramon156 4 hours ago
        can a druggie stop using when the quality is too poor? I get your analogy, but it doesn't apply here
        • hhh 4 hours ago
          yes, they die, just like vibers are unable to continue
          • cyanydeez 4 hours ago
            the parallel druggie are the AI companies who want to quit burning cash but tealize their users are all addicted to 40k GPUs that cost $100s dollars a month to use and theres no way to train a SOTA model better and guarantee better efficiency; so you promo double tokens as a cover for a QUANT downgrade while publishing a reskinned "upgrade" as super killer AI hoping some B2B will take a hit of the crack pipe.

            </tinfoil>

  • eaf7e281 1 hour ago
    I think they changed the quantification to save computer power for their new model. This might be why the benchmark scores look good, but the real world performance is much worse. I'm wondering if they're testing the model internally and didn't find anything wrong with the new parameter.

    I canceled my subscription and switched to a codex, but it's not as good. I'm tired of Anthropic changing things all the time. I use Claude because it doesn't redirect you to a different model like OpenAI does. But now it seems like both companies are doing the same thing in different way.

    • throwaway2027 1 hour ago
      Claude is worse, they don't tell you when your experience has degraded and don't even let you use worse models if you run out any.
  • bsaul 20 minutes ago
    could it be that anthropic is experiencing a massive shortage of compute capacity, and is desperately trying to find means to overcome it ?

    All the news i hear about this company for the past weeks made it sound like they're really desperate.

  • azuanrb 1 hour ago
    As a Pro user, even though these issues and bugs are “new,” the downgrade has been noticeable since January. I’ve unsubscribed because the Pro plan is no longer usable for me.

    It’s only making the news now because it’s affecting Max users as well ($100/$200 plans). I understand the need for change, but having zero communication about it is just wrong.

  • ikekkdcjkfke 6 hours ago
    If youre reading this claude, people are willing to pay extra if you want to make more money, just please stop doing this undermining, it devreases the trust of your platform to something that cannot be relied on
    • andai 2 hours ago
      It looks like selling reputation to save money.

      But more likely they are constrained on GPUs and can't get them fast enough.

      (My guess having no understanding of how this industry actually works.)

  • throwaway2027 5 hours ago
    I also noticed this, just resuming something eats up your entire session. The past two weeks also felt like a substantial downgrade and made me regret renewing my subscription, it sucks because I wish I kept my Codex subscription instead and renewed that.
  • throwaway2027 4 hours ago
    It's absolutely ridiculous how stupid Claude is now. I sometimes notice it and last year too but it feels like it's just last year before December model.
  • the_mitsuhiko 5 hours ago
    Since I (until Anthropic decided to remove access for subs) used Anthropic models extensively with pi I explored the two caching options and the much higher cost of 1h caches is almost never a good tradeoff.

    Since the caching really primarily is something they can be judged at scale from across many users I can only assume that Anthropic looked at their infra load and impact and made a very intentional change.

  • PunchyHamster 5 hours ago
    Well, how entirely expected. The money man comes to collect and they are squeezing for money
  • sscaryterry 6 hours ago
    Anthropic is leaving so much evidence around… proving damages and a pattern is becoming trivial
  • mrdw 1 hour ago
    I noticed another limitation: "An image in the conversation exceeds the dimension limit for many-image requests (2000px). Start a new session with fewer images."

    So I can't continue my claude code session I started yesterday.

  • coffinbirth 5 hours ago
    Am I the only one who sees striking parallels between being a Claude Code customer and Cuckoldry (as in biology)?

    I mean, you are investing a lot (infrastructure and capital) into something that is essentially not yours. You claim credit for the offspring (the solution) simply because it resides in your workspace. You accept foreign code to make your project appear more successful and populated than you could manage alone. Your over-reliance on a surrogate for the heavy lifting leads to the loss of your own survival skills (coding and debugging). Last but not least, you handle the grunt work of territory defense (clients and environments) while the AI performs the actual act of creation (Displaced Agency).

    • the_gipsy 5 hours ago
      What you're looking for is "vendor lock-in".
    • PunchyHamster 4 hours ago
      No, but it's very funny, I'm gonna call people that offshore their thinking to LLM "AI cucks" now
  • taffydavid 4 hours ago
    This is the same shit openAI used to do last year, quietly downgrading their offerings while hyping the next big thing. I thought Anthropic were different but it seems they're playing the exact same long con with Mythos.

    They can't really revolutionize AI again so they make the product worse and worse and then offer you a "better" one

  • simianwords 5 hours ago
    There’s a case for intelligent caching: coarse grained 1h and 5min type TTls are not optimal.
    • PunchyHamster 4 hours ago
      Caching LLM is not like caching normal content; the longer it is the more beneficial it is and it only stops being worth when user stops current session.

      So you'd need some adaptive algorithm to decide when to keep caching and when to purge it whole, possibly on client side, but if you give client the control, people will make it use most cache possible just to chase diminishing returns. So fine grained control here isn't all that easy; other possible option is just to have cache size per account and then intelligently purge it instead of relying just on TTL

      • cyanydeez 4 hours ago
        keep in mind, efficient KV caching needs to be next to the GPU, so you sls need you HA to keep routing the user to the same hardware.

        the hardware VM model is almost identical. Each session can go anywhere to start but a live session cant just be routed anywhere without penalty.

  • poly2it 4 hours ago
    One of the largest AI companies on Earth cannot figure out an algorithm for when not to drop caches in long-running sessions?
  • ares623 5 hours ago
    AGI finding bugs again. Actual Guys/Gals Instead.
  • WhereIsTheTruth 4 hours ago
    Changing "regression" to "Anthropic silently downgraded" sensationalizes the story

    Why the FUD?

    I notice some interesting public opinion weather change since Anthropic passed OpenAI wrt revenue

    • subscribed 2 hours ago
      From the response in the linked issue:

      >> Was there a change? Yes — March 6, intentional, part of ongoing cache optimization. You pinpointed the date correctly.

      The entire issue lays out how and why it's a silent downgrade. Also silent because it just happened, without announcing.

      I don't understand how is this FUD?

  • AlexSalikov 1 hour ago
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  • EthanFrostHI 8 hours ago
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  • GetBurnd 2 hours ago
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