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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\u2019 benefit, has done little to calm Anthropic\u2019s customers\u2014some of whom say they have already canceled their subscriptions.<\/p>\n
The feeling among some users that Anthropic had been gaslighting them potentially undercuts Anthropic\u2019s 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\u2019s efforts to ration precious computing power were the real reason for the performance issues.<\/p>\n
\u201cDemand for Claude has grown at an unprecedented rate, and our infrastructure has been stretched to meet it, particularly at peak hours,\u201d Anthropic said in a statement to Fortune. \u201cWe are doing everything we can to address this, and we are deeply grateful for our users\u2019 patience.\u201d<\/p>\n
The statement went on to say that \u201ccompute is a constraint across the entire industry, and we are scaling our compute rapidly and responsibly\u2014including 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\u2019 hands as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company also pushed back on any characterization that it had not been transparent with its users about the issues impacting Claude Code. \u201cThe Claude Code issues had specific technical causes that we documented in full in our postmortem, and the fixes are now shipped,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s annualized recurring revenue run rate to $30 billion\u2014more than triple its figure at the end of last year. However, the weeks-long performance decline and the lab\u2019s slow response to user complaints, as well as several changes that users argue amount to stealth price hikes, are testing that loyalty.<\/p>\n
The controversy could dent Anthropic\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Following widespread complaints about Claude Code\u2019s 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\u2014a 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.<\/p>\n
Anthropic\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Beyond the performance issues with Claude Code, the AI lab has also suffered a series of outages as usage has surged, introduced usage cap limits during peak hours, and is limiting the rollout of its newest, larger, and more expensive model, Mythos, to a select group of large firms. (Anthropic has said that the model\u2019s cautious rollout is meant to guard against security risks posed by the model\u2019s unprecedented cyber capabilities.)<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s 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\u2019s revenue chief claimed Anthropic had made a \u201cstrategic misstep\u201d by failing to secure sufficient compute, and was \u201coperating on a meaningfully smaller curve\u201d than its competitors. Anthropic has notably announced fewer multibillion-dollar deals for data center capacity than some of its rivals such as OpenAI.\u00a0While 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.<\/p>\n
Anthropic declined to answer CNBC\u2019s questions about the memo.\u00a0Anthropic has also publicly stated it does not purposely degrade the performance of its Claude models.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s $20-a-month Pro plan. Anthropic\u2019s head of growth later said the change had been a test on around 2% of new sign-ups, adding that usage patterns had \u201cchanged fundamentally\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
User backlash<\/p>\n
Anthropic has been dealing with significant backlash from some of its power users over Claude Code\u2019s recent performance issues. Several have said they have canceled subscriptions; cybersecurity professionals have warned of potentially dangerously degraded code quality; and a senior AI executive at AMD has called the tool \u201cunusable for complex engineering tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Users have complained of feeling \u201cgaslit\u201d by the company\u2019s response to their ongoing complaints about the coding tool\u2019s performance. One X user said in response to Anthropic\u2019s recent post: \u201cAfter 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI appreciate the postmortem, but I don\u2019t trust that all issues have been resolved. Claude Code, in general, has been barely usable for me in the past couple of days,\u201d another said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s default reasoning effort from \u201chigh\u201d to \u201cmedium\u201d to cut latency\u2014a tradeoff the company said in the blog post 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\u2019 usage limits faster than expected. The third, introduced on April 16, added a system prompt instruction capping the model\u2019s responses at 25 words between tool calls\u2014a change Anthropic said measurably hurt coding quality before it was reverted four days later.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The company acknowledged users\u2019 frustration with the tool, saying: \u201cThis isn\u2019t the experience users should expect from Claude Code.\u201d The lab as also promised greater transparency around changes to Claude Code in the future.<\/p>\n
Despite Anthropic\u2019s public acknowledgement, some users have taken to social media to express their frustration with the lab\u2019s initial response to users\u2019 concerns about Claude\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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\u2019s recent issues,\u201d Muratcan Koylan, a member of the technical staff at Sully.ai, said in a post on X. \u201cWhen you\u2019re 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The backlash risks pushing some of Anthropic\u2019s 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\u2019s Claude app hit 20 million by the end of February and that user growth had more than doubled month over month in March.<\/p>\n
The issues with Claude Code appear to have significantly affected the quality of code produced by Anthropic\u2019s tools in the past month or so, especially when compared with OpenAI\u2019s offerings.<\/p>\n
Analyses from coding security company Veracode found that Claude Opus 4.7, Anthropic\u2019s newest Claude model, which launched on April 16, introduced a vulnerability in 52% of coding tasks tested\u2014up from 51% for Opus 4.1 and 50% for the lower-cost Claude Sonnet 4.5. Veracode found OpenAI\u2019s models performed notably better, introducing vulnerabilities in around 30% of tasks.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s code quality, tracking defects, security issues, and task completion rates. The risk, Kennedy warned, is that novice developers using Claude won\u2019t catch the flaws, \u201cintroducing serious defects\u201d into production code.<\/p>\n
In response to the newest post from Anthropic, Kennedy said: \u201cI\u2019m glad they are trying to address this, but a month to get this out is crummy.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Anthropic #explains #Claude #Codes #performance #decline #weeks #user #backlash<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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