Anthropic silently downgraded cache TTL from 1h → 5M on March 6th
Cache TTL appears to have silently regressed from 1h to 5m around early March 2026, causing significant quota and cost inflation Summary Analysis of raw Claude Code session JSONL files spanning Jan...
The title should be changed. It makes it look like they upped the TTL from 1 h to 5 months.
The SI symbol for minutes is "min", not "M".
A compromise would be to use the OP notation "m".
>This is only an issue for people who do not know months are longer than hours.
I'm aware of that, and thought that "downgraded" was the wrong word to use when going from 1h to 5 months.
Several thoughts went through my head before I realized what's wrong:
1. I guess longer caching means more stale data, which is why it's a downgrade?
2. Maybe this isn't the TTL I thought it was?
3. Maybe this isn't the cache I thought?
Then I clicked on the link and realized I had been mislead my the title.
It's also routinely failing the car wash question across all models now, which wasn't the case a month ago. :-/
Seeing some things about how the effort selector isn't working as intended necessarily and the model is regressing in other ways: over-emphasizing how "difficult" a problem is to solve and choosing to avoid it because of the "time" it would take, but quoted in human effort, or suggesting the "easier" path forward even if it's a hack or kludge-filled solution.
Awesome, I didn't know about the car wash question.
Totally true, also tokens seem to burn through much faster. More parallelism could explain some of it but where I could work on 3-5 projects at once on the max plan a month ago, I can't even get one to completion now on the same Opus model before the 5h session locks me up..
I'm currently "working" on a toy 3d Vulkan Physx thingy. It has a simple raycast vehicle and I'm trying to replace it with the PhysX5 built in one (https://nvidia-omniverse.github.io/PhysX/physx/5.6.1/docs/Ve...)
I point it to example snippets and webdocumentation but the code it gens won't work at all, not even close
Opus4.6 is a tiny bit less wrong than Codex 5.4 xhigh, but still pretty useless.
So, after reading all the success stories here and everywhere, I'm wondering if I'm holding it wrong or if it just can't solve everything yet.
Has anybody else noticed a pretty significant shift in sentiment when discussing Claude/Codex with other engineers since even just a few months ago? Specifically because of the secret/hidden nature of these changes.
I keep getting the sense that people feel like they have no idea if they are getting the product that they originally paid for, or something much weaker, and this sentiment seems to be constantly spreading. Like when I hear Anthropic mentioned in the past few weeks, it's almost always in some negative context.
Just one more anecdote:
I'm on the enterprise team plan so a decent amount of usage.
In March I could use Opus all day and it was getting great results.
Since the last week of March and into April, I've had sessions where I maxed out session usage under 2 hours and it got stuck in overthinking loops, multiple turns of realising the same thing, dozens of paragraphs of "But wait, actually I need to do x" with slight variations of the same realisation.
This is not the 'thinking effort' setting in claude code, I noticed this happening across multiple sessions with the same thinking effort settings, there was clearly some underlying change that was not published that made the model get stuck in thinking loops more for longer and more often without any escape hatch to stop and prompt the user for additional steering if it gets stuck.
I’ve seen the point raised elsewhere that this could be the double usage promo that was available from the 13th of March to the 28th. ie. people getting used to the promo then feeling impacted when it finished.
Although it seems that enterprise wasn’t included, so maybe not in your case.
https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14063676-claude-march...
It's probably because you didn't specify "make no mistakes" /s
In all seriousness though, I've observed the same thing with my own usage.
I think there's a much more nefarious reason that you're missing.
It's pretty clear that OpenAI has consistently used bots on social networks to peddle their products. This could just be the next iteration, mass spreading lies about Anthropic to get people to flock back to their own products.
That would explain why a lot of users in the comments of those posts are claiming that they don't see any changes to limits.
The trouble with that argument, though, is that it works the other way as well: how do I, a random internet citizen, know that you're not doing the same thing for Anthropic with this comment?
(FWIW I have definitely noticed a cognitive decline with Claude / Opus 4.6 over the past month and a half or so, and unless I'm secretly working for them in my sleep, I'm definitely not an Anthropic employee.)
Oh it's pretty clear to me that Anthropic employs the same tactics and uses bots on socials to push its products too. On Reddit a couple of months ago it was simply unbearable with all the "Claude Opus is going to take all the jobs".
You definitely shouldn't trust me, as we're way beyond the point where you can trust ANYTHING on the internet that has a timestamp later than 2021 or so (and even then, of course people were already lying).
Personally I use Claude models through Bedrock because I work for Amazon, and I haven't noticed any decline. Instead it's always been pretty shit, and what people describe now as the model getting lost of infinite loops of talking to itself happened since the very start for me.
Preflight Checklist I have searched existing issues for similar behavior reports This report does NOT contain sensitive information (API keys, passwords, etc.) Type of Behavior Issue Other unexpect...
The enshittification meme has been taken too seriously to the point where it is shoehorned into every single place possible.
It is not in the interests for Anthropic to screw its customer base. Running a frontier lab comes with tradeoffs between training, inference and other areas.
This shows a lack of understanding of how markets work. Investors make money when the valuation of the company increases. The valuation of the company is the best prediction of future profit risk adjusted.
How would anthropic increase future profits without satisfying customers?
Have you seen the business models for these companies? Literal underpants gnome memes. OpenAI's goes like this:
1. Build AGI
2. Use said AGI to tell us how to become profitable
3. Profit!
Anthropic seems to be going all in on enterprise sales. Which means they don't actually have to please customers, or it's what ThePrimeagen humorously calls a "yacht problem"—a problem that only needs a solution after the IPO. For now all they have to do is convince corporate leadership that this is the future of work and sow enough FOMO to close those sales contracts and their projected sales, and stock valuation, goes through the roof.
Of course that value will collapse if they go without delivering on their promises long enough. That's why they call it a bubble. But by then, hopefully, Dario and the early investors will be long gone and even richer than they were to start. Their only competitor, OpenAI, is confronted with the same issues: the scalability problems won't go away, and addressing them doesn't drive stock valuation the way promising high rollers that AGI and total workforce automation are just around the corner does.
I certainly noticed a significant drop in reasoning power at some point after I subscribed to Claude. Since then I've applied all sorts of fixes that range from disabling adaptive thinking to maxing out thinking tokens to patching system prompts with an ad-hoc shell script from a gist. Even after all this, Opus will still sometimes go round and round in illogical circles, self-correcting constantly with the telltale "no wait" and undoing everything until it ends up right where it started with nothing to show for it after 100k tokens spent.
Whether it's due to bugs or actual malice, it's not a good look. I genuinely can't tell if it's buggy, if it's been intentionally degraded, if it's placebo or if it's all just an elaborate OpenAI psyop.
Preflight Checklist I have searched existing issues for similar behavior reports This report does NOT contain sensitive information (API keys, passwords, etc.) Type of Behavior Issue Other unexpect...
Yes, I commented on it and applied all remedies suggested.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47664442
Configuration and environment variables seem to have improved things somewhat but it still seems to be hit or miss.
Well, off the top of my head:
- Banning OpenClaw users (within their rights, of course, but bad optics)
- Banning 3rd party harnesses in general (ditto)
(claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)
- Lowering reasoning effort (and then showing up here saying "we'll try to make sure the most valuable customers get the non-gimped experience" (paraphrasing slightly xD))
- Massively reduced usage (apparently a bug?) The other day I got 21x more usage spend on the same task for Claude vs Codex.
- Noticed a very sharp drop in response length in the Claude app. Asked Claude about it and it mentioned several things in the system prompt related to reduced reasoning effort, keeping responses as brief as possible, etc.
It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".
I love Claude and I won't be switching any time soon (though with the usage limits I'm increasingly using Codex for coding), but it's getting hard to recommend it to friends lately. I told a friend "it was the best option, until about two weeks ago..." Now it's up in the air.
> claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked
I've used it with a sub a lot. Concurrency of 40 writing descriptions of thousands of images, running for hours on sonnet.
I have a lot of complaints. I've cancelled my $200 subscription and when it runs out in a few days I'll have to find something else.
But claude -p is fine.
... Or it was 2 week ago. Who knows if they've silently throttled it by now?
The other day I read that letting another agent invoke claude -p was considered a violation (i.e. letting OpenClaw delegate to Claude Code).
Not sure how that's enforced though. I was in OpenClaw discord a while ago and enforcement seemed a bit random.
I'll try to find the source, I might have gotten the details mixed up.
> (claude -p still works on the sub but I get the feeling like if I actually use it, I'll get my Anthropic acct. nuked. Would be great to get some clarity on this. If I invoke it from my Telegram bot, is that an unauthorized 3rd party harness?)
100% this, I’ve posted the same sentiment here on HN. I hate the chilling effect of the bans and the lack of clarity on what is and is not allowed.
There’s the argument that Anthropic has built Claude Code to use the models efficiently, which the subscription pricing is based on.
Maybe there’s some truth to that, but then why haven’t OpenAI made the same move? I believe the main reason is platform control. Anthropic can’t survive as a pipeline for tokens, they need to build and control a platform, which means aggressively locking out everybody else building a platform.
Alternatively products like openclaw have an outsized impact on Anthropic's infrastructure for essentially no benefit to them. Especially when you're taking advantage of the $200 plan.
OpenAI has never shyed away from burning mountains of cash to try and capture a little more market share. They paid a billion dollars for a vibe coded mess just for the opportunity to associate themselves with the hype.
> It's all circumstantial but everything points towards "desperately trying to cut costs".
I have been wondering if it's more geared at reducing resource usage, given that at the moment there's a known constraint on AI datacenter expansion capability. Perhaps they are struggling to meet demand?
A month ago the company I work at with over 400 engineers decided to cancel all IDE subscriptions (Visual Studio, JetBrains, Windsurf, etc.) and move everyone over to Claude Code as a "cost-saving measure" (along with firing a bunch of test engineers). There was no migration plan - the EVP of Technology just gave a demo showing 2 greenfield projects he'd built with Claude Opus over a weekend and told everyone to copy how he worked. A week later the EVP had to send out an email telling people to stop using Opus because they were burning through too many tokens.
Claude seems to be getting nerfed every week since we've switched. I wonder how our EVP is feeling now.
Pretty bad decision on his part. I've been telling other engineers within my company who felt threatened by AI that this would happen. That prices would rise and the marginal cost for changes to big codebases would start to exceed the cost of an engineer's salary. API credits are expensive, especially for huge contexts, and sometimes the model will use $200 in credits trying to solve a problem that could be fixed in an hour by a good engineer with enough context.
It kind of reminds me of the joke where a plumber charges $500 for a 5 minute visit. When the client complains the plumber says it's $50 for labor and $450 for knowing how to fix the problem.
lsdmtme