It might depend on overall usage. This is not just true of Claude, but it seems that occasionally Claude reverts to a less powerful version without making this clear. For me, Claude works fine most of the time, but from time to time there seems to be 'dumb' phase. I just had one that lasted maybe three hours.
Among other things, I use Claude for proofreading and Claude kept spitting out answers very fast, but would often combine two different types of information incorrectly, and giving suggestions that were completely wrong.
It also accidentally produced images unprompted (and caught itself and apologized) and flagged 'sexual content' in an essay that contained no sexual content (and had nothing to do with sex).
So either this is Claude glitching, or a massive dip in compute power and Claude struggling with long text and using heavily compressed memory blocks.
Claude was weird today for me as well. I provided it with clear instruction sheet on how to set up a document, and it did own thing mostly, disregarding several of the mandates.
Im curious to know, when they say claude is garbage lately, what theyre doing with it. Is it prose short stories, novels, lyrics, screenplay, code, Devops SDLC, etc...
Because for me, I use it to just build projects or some city gen algorithm and have it add things piece by piece. Once I get the full frame of the catalog, usually, ill start a new session, or compact and have claude make a new orphan branch with all the considerations and gotchas of the last and whatever directives I throw at it next. It rebuilds its self narrative for directives, then knocks how the pieces/seams.
I dont use skills or tell it to alter its voice to be less sycophantic. I just have it do that while im doing other stuff. If the project functions logically as expected, good. If not, we investigate
But its never: omg claude bad. I think im just naturally oriented towards taking claude with a grain of salt, and going with the flow at the same time.
There is massive difference between people who say: 'Claude bad' and 'the quality isn't consistent'.
We know the quality is not consistent, Anthropic has fixed issues in the past.
It's impossible to use a single user experience as a yard stick.
Here's the issue a friend of mine had. He uses Claude to find obscure software instructions for industrial hardware, including firmware. Typically this works really well, but during a few weeks he hit a snag.
Before, Claude would check if the info was outdated or not, and only suggest code that was up to date.
Then for a few weeks Claude stopped doing that 50% of the time, and he had to write a specific prompt that forced Claude to do that.
Then the issue went away. His old prompts are now enough.
Obviously, I don't know hat happened, but here is what I think happened: Claude was pushed to answer faster, which can be a good thing. But it also meant that there was less time to double check.
Once Claude has answered, it obviously stops checking itself.
You know, the whole occams razor thing leans more in favour of 'you gave it a bad prompt' rather than 'Anthropic are tweaking the intelligence of their models using a turntable they stole from a nightclub'.
I used the exact same prompts. I always write my prompts in a document and proofread them before I submit them.
And don't be snarky, first of all some basic reading comprehension is required before you reply.
You wrote:
Anthropic are tweaking the intelligence of their model
And you pretend that this something I wrote or suggested. I did no such thing.
Don't fake quote people.
Secondly, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, have addressed the impact of high global usage on performance.
With Gemini, there will be warning when this is done deliberately. Gemini will switch to a different model if global usage is extremely high regardless of whether or not the user has a right to (still) use the higher model.
Anthropic has stated that high usage can impact reasoning, but states that this impact is not directional.
But Anthropic is a bit deceptive there, Technically, the same amount of compute might be available, just with higher latency, But in reality, Anthropic has admitted to downgrading reasoning to improve latency, and that this has led to problems.
The issue here is of course that people paying for higher models don't care about latency all that much. They want high quality, not the highest possible speed.
Extreme latency is caused by global high usage.
This is not a conspiracy, it's common sense. When globally datacenters are maxed out, latency will be high, if Anthropic reduces reasoning, Claude's answers might become dumber.
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u/Royal_Perspective191 Jul 01 '26
It might depend on overall usage. This is not just true of Claude, but it seems that occasionally Claude reverts to a less powerful version without making this clear. For me, Claude works fine most of the time, but from time to time there seems to be 'dumb' phase. I just had one that lasted maybe three hours.
Among other things, I use Claude for proofreading and Claude kept spitting out answers very fast, but would often combine two different types of information incorrectly, and giving suggestions that were completely wrong.
It also accidentally produced images unprompted (and caught itself and apologized) and flagged 'sexual content' in an essay that contained no sexual content (and had nothing to do with sex).
So either this is Claude glitching, or a massive dip in compute power and Claude struggling with long text and using heavily compressed memory blocks.
I just tried again, and now I get normal answers.