VentureBeatApr 13, 05:11 PM
Is Anthropic 'nerfing' Claude? Users increasingly report performance degradation as leaders push back
A growing number of developers and AI power users are taking to social media to accuse Anthropic of degrading the performance of Claude Opus 4.6 and Claude Code — intentionally or as an outcome of compute limits — arguing that the company’s flagship coding model feels less capable, less reliable and more wasteful with tokens than it did just weeks ago.
The complaints have spread quickly on Github, X and Reddit over the past several weeks, with several high-reach posts alleging that Claude has become worse at sustained reasoning, more likely to abandon tasks midway through, and more prone to hallucinations or contradictions.
Some users have framed the issue as “AI shrinkflation” — the idea that customers are paying the same price for a weaker product.
Others have gone further, suggesting Anthropic may be throttling or otherwise tuning Claude downward during periods of heavy demand.
Those claims remain unproven, and Anthropic employees have publicly denied that the company degrades models to manage capacity. At the same time, Anthropic has acknowledged real changes to usage limits and reasoning defaults in recent weeks, which has made the broader debate more combustible.
VentureBeat has reached out to Anthropic for further clarification on the recent accusations, including whether any recent changes to reasoning defaults, context handling, throttling behavior, inference parameters or benchmark methodology could help explain the spike in complaints.
We have also asked how Anthropic explains the recent benchmark-related claims and whether it plans to publish additional data that could reassure customers. An Anthropic spokesperson did not address the questions individually, instead referring us to X posts by Claude Code creator Boris Cherny and Claude Code team member Thariq Shihipar regarding Opus 4.6 performance and usage limits, respectively. Both X posts are also referenced and linked below.
Viral user complaints, including from an AMD Senior Director, argue Claude has become less capable
One of the most detailed public complaints originated as a GitHub issue filed by Stella Laurenzo on April 2, 2026, whose LinkedIn profile identifies her as Senior Director in AMD’s AI group.
In that post, Laurenzo wrote that Claude Code had regressed to the point that it could not be trusted for complex engineering work, then backed that claim with a sprawling analysis of 6,852 Claude Code session files, 17,871 thinking blocks and 234,760 tool calls.
The complaint argued that, starting in February, Claude’s estimated reasoning depth fell sharply while signs of poorer performance rose alongside it, including more premature stopping, more “simplest fix” behavior, more reasoning loops, and a measurable shift from research-first behavior to edit-first behavior.
The post’s broader point was that for advanced engineering workflows, extended reasoning is not a luxury but part of what makes the model usable in the first place.
That GitHub thread then escaped int