The puzzling thing is why Google would try to help with that. Aren't they competitors? Wouldn't they want their competitor to have problems?

It's more understanding for Amazon or Microsoft to make such an investment, because they're not as competitive in the model space.

> the efficiency changes that have created this perceived downtrend in claude quality”

Why the euphemism? What Anthropic did was an aggressive degradation of their model to save compute, and it's not just “perceived downtrend”, Anthropic themselves have acknowledged the quality of service degradation.