It's time to cancel your subscriptions - Anthropic is silently nerfing Claude's reasoning budget while telling you it's the same model

A 65-day analysis of over 43,000 Claude Code invocations suggests Anthropic is silently reducing Claude's reasoning budget. The study found that 39% of Fable 5 calls receive zero thinking tokens, and the median invocation gets only 123, despite benchmarks using 16K-128K. August saw an 18-50% drop in thinking budget compared to July, with the median hitting zero around August 22. This practice, while selling "full model access," leads users to blame their own prompting for performance issues.