On paper. There's huge financial incentive to quantize the crap out of a good model to save cash after you've hooked in subscriptions.

Real world usage suggests otherwise. It's been a known trend for a while. Anthropic even confirmed as such ~6 months ago but said it was a "bug" - one that somehow just keeps happening 4-6 months after a model is released.

They do. I'm currently seeing a degradation on Opus 4.6 on tasks it could do without trouble a few months back. Obvious I'm a sample of n=1, but I'm also convinced a new model is around the corner and they preemptively nerf their current model so people notice the "improvement".

You sure about that?

https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

Only nominally...

Oh yes, they do.

I think the conspiracy theories are silly, but equally I think pretending these black boxes are completely stable once they're released is incorrect as well.