Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3

Retro_Dev

As one user pointed out: > I noticed this too as did many others. Had to bump my default reasoning but it’s not the same. Seems to often happen before new model drops I heard that Qwen4 was dropping some time soon, I wonder if Anthropic is trying to announce a new model immediately after Qwen4 - both for their IPO, and to kill the competition.

terminalcommand

I am using Opus 5.5 high almost exclusively. I definitely felt this and looked for nerfing watch sites. It felt like downgrading to the old version of deepseek. Things have improved a bit now.

sunaookami

It's just a new summarizer, the model and performance itself is unchanged.

xscott

With open weights, YOU get to decide when the model changes.

Giorgi

Yes, I noticed it too, dumbing down continues, there goes their IPO.

hebelehubele

They're preparing to release a new model, so it has to look better than the current one.

ghoul2

Definitely a significant change. I noticed it in just daily work. Quality of work down, mistakes up, repetitive errors in scripts - rare earlier, now a few every session.

listedb

It's dumbing down a little bit but I don't think its a lot worse. I think the change in display adds to the feel

tammyselvi

not as bad as sol 6.1. im getting better results out of glm 5.3

benwills

I noticed Fable decline in quality a couple weeks ago. And I've noticed Opus drop over the last week, even after bumping to a default of Extra High reasoning for almost everything. Tonight has been maddening with the kinds of absurd mistakes it's repeatedly making. It's so frustrating. I'm the kind of person that wants something to be consistent and reliable. And Anthropic has been great, except for in this way. Which is enough of a recurring frustration (about every couple months this year) that I genuinely can't wait for other options to catch up. Then I'll be leaving as soon as I can. I just don't know how long that will be.

shikck200

Token use exploded a week or two ago. I worked for a few hours and hit my 5 hour limit. Did only some simple bug fix. Somethings definitely broken. This is the #1 thing i HATE with LLMs. They are not predictable like a compiler is.

davidd_1004

Seems fine to me

peri-cl

Eagerly awaiting Artificial Analysis to redo their Anthropic benchmarks and kick it down 15-20 index points, in the interests of accuracy. Those guys love accuracy. They moved Heaven and Earth to kick Kimi off the #2 spot, out of their deep, abiding passion for having the most accurate benchmarks in the industry. I have no doubt they will ensure their users get an accurate picture of Opus 5.5 within hours.

xbmcuser

From what I understand they are picking and choosing who is running the latest models. So nerfed yes but for you not for everyone

tsukikage

LiveNerf suggests not. https://github.com/ninjahawk/livenerf

rzk

It seems to be an A/B testing experiment: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1xr9x5y/the_ner...

igleria

as a user I believe it: they are probably reducing assigned compute to prepare to offer new models. That would be the less bad reason.

lukax

I guess it's just capacity problems. They probably have a fixed amount of compute and they need to make space for new models that will be released. So they quantize existing models e.g. in half so that can use 50% of current capacity for new models. They have such massive scale that you just cannot dynamically get that amount of new compute online so they need to work with what they have. No provider has thousands of GPUs idle.

PUSH_AX

Fable 5.1 quality took a significant dive for me last week. I'm not imagining it.

throwaw12

LLMs are such a great business, they are non-deterministic, hence you can do whatever you want, because customers can't do anything about it: * nerf them based on supply and demand, when you have a high demand, nerf it, but keep charging same price. * do you want to show revenue growth to investors? increase thinking tokens, customers will keep paying, because again, this is non-deterministic system, sometimes it thinks more * do you want to increase profits? start serving 4-bit, 5-bit quantizations and keep charging same price * want even more? publish a paper "Advanced Auto Super Smart Prompt Router - AASSPiRation", and start routing requests to Qwen3.8-27B or GemmaE2B from time to time on the edge * Not enough? introduce "Complex Chained Workflows - CCW" in your coding harness, which spawns multiple deterministic workflows (which you can't stop or control) and they will use Haiku to write the code, then use Opus 5.5 high to verify the code (which is obviously wrong) and Opus 5.5 produces recommendations on how to fix the code, delegates to Haiku, which again fails writing proper code, and keep doing it 5-6 times, you made lots and lots of money (don't forget, all should run in parallel, to pick one best result among 10 outputs).