Anthropic silently downgraded cache TTL from 1h → 5M on March 6th

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/46829

Cache TTL silently regressed from 1h to 5m around early March 2026, causing quota and cost inflation · Issue #46829 · anthropics/claude-code

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...

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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.

Yeah I’ve seen this too. It’s difficult for me to tell if the complaints are due to a legitimate undisclosed nerf of Claude, or whether it’s just the initial awe of Opus 4.6 fading and people increasingly noticing its mistakes.

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.

Judging from the number of GitHub issues on Anthropic, shamelessly being dismissed as "fixed", I doubt openai needs the bots to tarnish that competitor.

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.