Anthropic admits engineering missteps behind Claude Code decline as users revolt

Anthropic tests reaction to yanking Claude Code from Pro

Unannounced change apparently aimed at two percent of users but hit documentation for everyone Anthropic has removed Claude Code from its Pro subscription plan, according to some of its public-facing web pages, but the company says it's only a test for a small number of users. On Monday, the company's pricing web page stated its Pro plan "includes Claude Code." On Tuesday, that phrase is no longer present, and elsewhere on the page, the feature list for the Pro plan includes an explicit "X" rather than a check mark for Claude Code. The changes were previously noted by AI industry skeptic Ed Zitron. Anthropic's changed product inclusions have not reached all corners of its site. At the time this article was filed, the Claude Code product page still stated the Pro plan provides access to the code generation tool. And when this reporter accessed Claude Code from the CLI, the terminal output still says "Claude Pro." Claude.ai, when queried about this, insisted that the Pro plan includes Claude Code, but one of the cited documentation pages, updated today, mentions only the Max plan. Losing access to Claude Code understandably alarmed developers and that sentiment reached Anthropic, whose head of growth Amol Avasare published a social media post indicating that the change represented an experiment. "For clarity, we're running a small test on ~2 percent of new prosumer signups," he said. "Existing Pro and Max subscribers aren't affected." Why Anthropic felt that the update to its public-facing pricing page would address only some users and not the entire internet isn't entirely clear. And a company spokesperson did not respond to a follow-up question about that. Avasare went on to explain: "When we launched Max a year ago, it didn't include Claude Code, Cowork didn't exist, and agents that run for hours weren't a thing. Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it. "Since then, we bundled Claude Code into Max and it took off after Opus 4. Cowork landed. Long-running async agents are now everyday workflows. The way people actually use a Claude subscription has changed fundamentally. "Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this. "So we're looking at different options to keep delivering a great experience for users. We don't know exactly what those look like yet - that's what we're testing and getting feedback on right now." Anthropic has been taking steps recently to limit usage of its AI models to dampen demand amid tight capacity, a problem also faced by GitHub and Google. Claude in its various forms has become exceedingly popular in the past few months, and the advent of projects like OpenClaw led many developers to create agents using Claude models. The basic problem is that Anthropic's subscription plans charge far less than the book value of tokens consumed, sometimes by a factor of ten or more. The company introduced usage limits last month to encourage use during off-peak hours, much as a power utility might do to prompt energy conservation. As noted by Avasare, Anthropic is exploring further usage limitations. Predictably, Claude subscribers venting in online forums resent what many assumed was a major change to their plans, noting that Anthropic appears to want former Pro subscribers to adopt cheaper-to-use Chinese models like Minimax, Qwen, Kimi, and GLM. What's striking about the transition is not so much that it happened but the lack of coherent communication to customers. Maybe Anthropic feels doesn't need to offer fair warning or clear announcements of plan changes to individual customers who pay a mere $20 a month. Enterprise customers, however, don't like that sort of uncertainty and may worry that Anthropic doesn't consider customer relations a priority. Avasare seems to be aware of this. "When we do land on something, if it affects existing subscribers you'll get plenty of notice before anything changes," he said, and promised customers "Will hear it from us, not a screenshot on X or Reddit."

You weren't imagining it -- Claude Code really did get worse, and Anthropic just explained why

* High-to-medium effort cut slowed Claude; Anthropic restored high default on Apr 7. * A bug cleared prior 'thinking' every turn, causing forgetting and repetition; fixed Apr 10. * A 25/100-word system prompt to cut verbosity hurt coding quality; reverted Apr 20. If you've been using Claude Code over the last month or so, you may have noticed that the agent's quality degraded somewhat. It's easy to chalk it up to your imagination, but this time, it's not you; it's Claude Code. Anthropic has published a blog post detailing three areas where Claude Code had degraded performance since March, and how it fixed each one. Anthropic cut Claude Code from new Pro subscriptions, calling it an "A/B test" It's no longer shown as available for Pro subscribers on the payment plan page. Posts By Simon Batt Claude Code suffered three issues over the last month It was a rough period for the AI agent Over on the Anthropic website, the company published a blog post titled "An update on recent Claude Code quality reports." In it, the company reveals three areas that affected Claude's performance and caused a notable decline in its abilities. The good news is, since April 20th, all three pain points have been fixed, so Claude Code should be back to normal now. The first issue began on March 4th, when Anthropic noticed that Claude Code's default reasoning effort was causing large delays, to the point where people assumed the app had frozen. To remedy it, they swapped the effort level from "high" to "medium," which limited Claude Code's capabilities. Anthropic reverted the change on April 7th after users told the company that they'd prefer to have "high" as the norm and reduce the effort value when needed; if they want Claude Code to respond faster, they could always reduce the effort themselves. The second one appeared on March 26th on Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6. Anthropic tweaked the system to remove Claude's older thinking if a chat sat idle for over an hour, meaning responses used fewer tokens when the session was resumed. Unfortunately, a bug caused this to happen after every turn, meaning Claude kept forgetting things and repeated phrases a lot. This got fixed on April 10th. Finally, on April 16th, Anthropic says that it "added a system prompt instruction to reduce verbosity." Specifically, the prompt said this: "Length limits: keep text between tool calls to ≤25 words. Keep final responses to ≤100 words unless the task requires more detail. The change didn't mix well with other prompting tweaks, causing it to "hurt coding quality," as Anthropic puts it. The problem got fixed on April 20th. I set up Claude Code the way its creator does, and the difference is night and day Who better to learn from than the person who made it? Posts 18 By Mahnoor Faisal

Anthropic considers pulling Claude Code from its $20 Pro plan

These moves suggest current pricing models are becoming unsustainable as AI capabilities advance, potentially forcing significant plan restructuring across providers. Wasn't I just saying that flat-rate AI plans are broken? Now we've got more proof, this time coming from the makers of Claude. Eagled-eyed Claude users caught Anthropic tinkering with the signup page for individual Claude Pro and Max plans. Specifically, they saw that Claude Code was nixed from the features available on Claude Pro. The Claude Code bullet point eventually returned to the Claude Pro signup page, and Anthropic Head of Growth Amol Avasare later posted on social media that the change was just "a small test on ~2% of new prosumer signups," adding that nothing had changed for current Pro ($20/month) and Max ($100/month and up) users. But then Avasare expanded on his comments, noting that when Claude Max first launched a year ago, Claude Code wasn't included, Cowork "didn't exist," and "agents that run for hours weren't a thing." "Max was designed for heavy chat usage, that's it," Avasare continued. "Engagement per subscriber is way up. We've made small adjustments along the way (weekly caps, tighter limits at peak), but usage has changed a lot and our current plans weren't built for this." It's the "our current plans weren't built for this" part that caught my attention. Avasare seems to be stating quite plainly what I wrote yesterday: that flat-rate AI plans like Claude Pro and Claude Max are broken, mainly due to the rise in agentic AI applications like Claude Cowork and Claude Code. So, is Anthropic getting ready to yank Claude Code from Claude Pro users? That's the big question. I've reached out to Anthropic for comment and will update this story if I get a worthwhile response. But following GitHub's recent decision to suspend signups for its own flat-rate Copilot plans as well as pull Claude Opus access from its $10/month Pro plan, the writing seems to be on the wall: Big changes are coming to individual AI plans, and agent-focused features like code and desktop AI assistants might be the first to go. If that seems like a bait-and-switch, well, I don't blame you, especially if you ponied up for an annual AI plan like Claude Pro or Max. One would hope that if Anthropic does downgrade its consumer plans, it would either allow current subscribers to keep their existing functionality or offer refunds to those who want them. Then again, if Anthropic were to go ahead and drop Claude Code from the list of Claude Pro features, the move would create an opportunity for Anthropic's competitors -- namely OpenAI with Codex. Replying to Avasare's comments, OpenAI chief and mortal Anthropic opponent Sam Altman trolled the exec with an "ok boomer," hinting that the ChatGPT creator would be all too happy to scoop up those Claude users angered by any upcoming Claude plan changes.

Anthropic explains Claude Code's recent performance decline after weeks of user backlash | Fortune

Anthropic, the AI lab valued at $380 billion, has acknowledged that a series of engineering missteps were behind a widely-experienced decline in the performance of its Claude Code tool that sparked a user revolt over the past month. The latest admission, which came after weeks in which Anthropic had initially implied in its communications that nothing was wrong and that users were largely to blame for any performance problems and later said some of the changes had been made for users' benefit, has done little to calm Anthropic's customers -- some of whom say they have already cancelled their subscriptions. The feeling among some users that Anthropic had been gaslighting them potentially undercuts Anthropic's attempts to market itself as more transparent and aligned with its users than rival OpenAI. Nor has the admission that there were performance problems done much to quell rampant speculation that the company is running short of computing resources and that Anthropic's efforts to ration precious computing power were the real reason for the performance issues. "Demand for Claude has grown at an unprecedented rate, and our infrastructure has been stretched to meet it, particularly at peak hours," Anthropic said in a statement to Fortune. "We are doing everything we can to address this and we are deeply grateful for our users' patience." The statement went on to say that "compute is a constraint across the entire industry, and we are scaling our compute rapidly and responsibly -- including through a recently announced expansion of our partnership with Amazon and Google, which will bring significant new capacity online in the coming months. Our priority is getting that capacity into our users' hands as quickly as possible." The company also pushed back on any characterization that it had not been transparent with its users about the issues impacting Claude Code. "The Claude Code issues had specific technical causes that we documented in full in our postmortem, and the fixes are now shipped," the statement said. Anthropic has built much of its recent success on the loyalty of developers. Its Claude Code tool, launched in early 2025, has been popular with solo developers and enterprise engineering teams. The runaway success of the tool has helped send the company's annualized recurring revenue run rate to $30 billion -- more than triple its figure at the end of last year. However, the weeks-long performance decline and the lab's slow response to user complaints, as well as several changes that users argue amount to stealth price hikes, is testing that loyalty. The controversy could dent Anthropic's bottom line amid an increasingly bitter race with rival OpenAI. The issues also come at a critical time, with both companies reportedly gearing up for initial public stock offerings later this year. Following widespread complaints about Claude Code's performance, executives representing the AI lab initially said the performance issues were the result of changes it had made to improve latency and in response to user feedback about token use. It said both changes were communicated via its public changelog -- a running list of updates available to users. On Thursday, however, Anthropic went further, publishing a detailed engineering post acknowledging that three separate engineering missteps were behind the performance issue. In an effort to respond to some of the user complaints, the lab also said it would reset usage limits for all subscribers. Anthropic's newest admission is likely to increase already widespread speculation that the lab may be suffering from a compute strains after use of its products soared in the past few months. Beyond the performance issues with Claude Code, the AI lab has also suffered a series of outages as usage has surged, introduced usage caps limits during peak hours, and is limiting the roll-out of its newest, larger, and more expensive model, Mythos, to a select group of large firms. (Anthropic has said that the model's cautious roll-out is due to the security risks posed by the model's unprecedented cyber capabilities.) The company's rivals have also furthered rumors that the lab may be lacking the compute needed to maintain its recent customer surge. In an internal memo first reported by CNBC, OpenAI's revenue chief claimed Anthropic had made a "strategic misstep" by failing to secure sufficient compute, and was "operating on a meaningfully smaller curve" than its competitors. Anthropic has also notably announced fewer multibillion-dollar deals for data center capacity than some of its rivals like OpenAI. While other AI companies are also facing compute constraints, Anthropic appears to be in the most difficult position, having grown far faster than it likely anticipated. Anthropic declined to answer CNBC's questions about the memo. Anthropic has also publicly stated it does not purposely degrade the performance of its Claude models. The company also appears to be testing potential ways to limit new access to Claude Code. Earlier this week, Anthropic updated its pricing page for some users to show Claude Code as unavailable on the company's $20-a-month Pro plan. Anthropic's head of growth later said the change had been a test on around 2% of new sign-ups, adding that usage patterns had "changed fundamentally" since the plans were designed. Separately, The Information reported that Anthropic had shifted its enterprise pricing to a consumption-based model, a move one analyst estimated could potentially triple costs for heavy users. Anthropic has been dealing with significant backlash from some of its power users over Claude Code's recent performance issues. Several have said they have cancelled subscriptions, cybersecurity professionals have warned of potentially dangerously degraded code quality, and a senior AI executive at AMD has called the tool "unusable for complex engineering tasks." Users have complained of feeling "gaslit" by the company's response to their ongoing complaints about the coding tool's performance. One X user said in response to Anthropic's recent post: "After they gaslit users and pretended nothing was wrong, countless complaining from tonnes of people here and elsewhere, cancellations, Anthropic finally admit on the day GPT-5.5 releases there is a problem with Claude." "I appreciate the post-mortem, but I don't trust that all issues have been resolved. Claude Code, in general, has been barely usable for me in the past couple of days," another said. In a post published to its engineering blog on Thursday, Anthropic said it had traced the problems to three distinct changes. The first, rolled out on March 4, reduced Claude Code's default reasoning effort from "high" to "medium" to cut latency -- a tradeoff the company said in the blogpost was the wrong one. The second change, shipped on March 26, contained a bug that caused the model to continuously discard its own reasoning history mid-session, making it appear forgetful and erratic, and draining users' usage limits faster than expected. The third, introduced on April 16, added a system prompt instruction capping the model's responses at 25 words between tool calls -- a change Anthropic said measurably hurt coding quality before it was reverted four days later. Anthropic noted that all three issues were resolved as of April 20, with the API unaffected throughout. On April 23, the company reset usage limits for all subscribers. The company acknowledged users' frustration with the tool, saying: "This isn't the experience users should expect from Claude Code." The lab as also promised greater transparency around changes to Claude Code in the future. Despite Anthropic's public acknowledgement, some users have taken to social media to express their frustrations with the lab's initial response to users concerns about Claude's performance. "The frustrating part is that the Claude Code team, along with people deep in AI psychosis, have been gaslighting anyone who raises concerns about Claude Code's recent issues," Muratcan Koylan, a member of technical staff at Sully.ai, said in a post on X. "When you're paying a lot of money for a product and it actually makes your job harder, to the point where people make you start questioning the quality of your own work, it really becomes a problem." The backlash risks pushing some of Anthropic's power users toward rival OpenAI, whose recent Codex models have also been popular with developers. On Thursday, OpenAI also launched GPT-5.5, its newest AI model, to paid subscribers. The company said it now had 4 million active Codex users, 9 million paying business customers, 900 million weekly active users on ChatGPT, and more than 50 million subscribers. Anthropic has not published comparable user figures. The company has disclosed business metrics, including more than 300,000 enterprise customers, but has not released subscriber or active user numbers. Independent app and web traffic site SimilarWeb has reported that active monthly users of Anthropic's Claude app hit 20 million by the end of February and that user growth had more than doubled month-over-month in March. The issues with Claude Code appear to have significantly affected the quality of code produced by Anthropic's tools in the last month or so, especially when compared to OpenAI's offerings. Analyses from coding security company Veracode found that Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic's newest Claude model, which launched on April 16, introduced a vulnerability in 52% of coding tasks tested -- up from 51% for Opus 4.1 and 50% for the lower-cost Claude Sonnet 4.5. Veracode found OpenAI's models performed notably better, introducing vulnerabilities in around 30% of tasks. Dave Kennedy, CEO of cybersecurity firm TrustedSec and a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer, told Forbes his team had measured a 47% drop in Claude's code quality, tracking defects, security issues, and task completion rates. The risk, Kennedy warned, is that novice developers using Claude won't catch the flaws, "introducing serious defects" into production code. In response to the newest post from Anthropic, Kennedy said: "I'm glad they are trying to address this, but a month to get this out is crummy."

Anthropic Clarifies Claude Code Struggles were Accidental, Not Strategic

Recent complaints from developers about slower responses and weaker outputs from Claude Code have sparked widespread speculation. The company may have secretly diminished the model's capabilities. However, Anthropic has now published a detailed post-mortem clarifying that this was not a deliberate reduction in performance. Instead, a series of technical errors in the deployment pipeline caused unexpected performance drops. The company took action quickly to restore normal performance and publish its findings, an unusually transparent step in the competitive AI industry. The explanation matters because developers' trust depends on reliability. When performance suddenly dips, users assume the worst. In this case, the truth turned out to be more technical than strategic.