Anthropic is facing a wave of user backlash over reports of performance issues with its Claude AI chatbot

Anthropic, the high-flying AI company, is facing a backlash from some of its most prolific users over a perceived decline in the performance of its Claude AI models.The issues have left the company—recently valued at $380 billion and reportedly en route to an IPO—scrambling to respond to user revolt and online speculation about its motives and its ability to serve its newest wave of customers.

Anthropic’s popular Claude AI model has seen a significant decline in performance recently according to many developers and heavy users, who say the model increasingly fails to follow instructions, opts for sometimes inappropriate shortcuts, and makes more mistakes on complex workflows.The complaints appear to be connected to recent changes Anthropic quietly made to the way Claude operates, reducing the model’s default “effort” level in order to economize on the number of tokens, or units of data, the model processes in response to each request.The more tokens processed per task, the more computing power that task consumes. And there is widespread speculation that Anthropic, which has announced fewer multi-billion dollar deals for data center capacity than some of its rivals, may be running short of computing resources after its adoption of its products soared in the past few months.User dissatisfaction with Claude’s sudden performance decline and anger at Anthropic’s perceived lack of transparency could potentially derail the company’s runaway growth, just as the company is hoping to woo investors for a potential IPO. The claims that Anthropic has not been candid about the changes it has made to the way Claude operates or the way the changes may increase the cost for using Claude are particularly threatening to Anthropic because it, more than any other AI company, has tried to build a brand reputation on being more transparent than other AI companies and more aligned with its users’ interests.

Anthropic declined to answer Fortune’s specific questions about Claude users’ complaint on the record. Boris Cherny, the Anthropic executive who leads its Claude Code product, responded to user complaints online by saying that Anthropic had reduced the default “effort” Claude makes in answering user prompts to “medium” in response to user feedback that Claude was previously consuming too many tokens per task. But many users complained that the company had not........

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