Is your AI getting worse? · Anthropic

Is Claude getting worse?

Over the last 24 hours none of the 9 Claude models we track is below its recent baseline on any board, and no drift detector has fired.

Watch a Claude model

Three models free · email when a watched model's coding score falls five points in a week

As of 26 Oct 2026, 11:22 UTC · 24-hour boards · per-suite Page-Hinkley detectors

9
Claude models on the same tests as every other vendor's models
27 of 27
per-suite drift detectors armed with no detection
100%
of our probes to api.anthropic.com answered in the last 7 days

01

Is Claude nerfed right now?

Over the last 24 hours none of the 9 Claude models we track is below its recent baseline on any board, and no drift detector has fired.

As of 26 Oct 2026, 11:22 UTC · 24-hour boards · score, then place among the ranked models; “=” marks a statistical tie

Claude models on the four boards over the last 24 hours, with the state of each model's Page-Hinkley detector per suite and the day it was first tracked.
ModelCombinedCodingReasoningTool useTrendDrift detectorsTracked since
Claude Opus 5.594=1 of 2495=1 of 2499=1 of 2286=1 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
22 Sep 2026
Claude Sonnet 5.592=1 of 2493=5 of 2497=1 of 2286=1 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
28 Sep 2026
Claude Fable 5.191=1 of 2487=18 of 24100=1 of 2290=1 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
2 Sep 2026
Claude Opus 590=1 of 2487=18 of 2498=1 of 2289=1 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
25 Jul 2026
Claude Sonnet 589=1 of 2489=16 of 2490=15 of 2288=1 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
1 Jul 2026
Claude Opus 4.878=20 of 2488=18 of 2459=17 of 2278=14 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
29 May 2026
Claude Opus 4.778=20 of 2493=5 of 2453=20 of 2272=20 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
17 Apr 2026
Claude Opus 4.676=20 of 2491=11 of 2452=20 of 2270=20 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
6 Feb 2026
Claude Sonnet 4.674=20 of 2490=11 of 244622 of 2270=20 of 22stable
  • Coding armed, no detection
  • Reasoning armed, no detection
  • Tool use armed, no detection
18 Feb 2026
Claude Opus 5.5
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 1st of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 22 Sep 2026.
Claude Sonnet 5.5
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 1st of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 28 Sep 2026.
Claude Fable 5.1
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 1st of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 2 Sep 2026.
Claude Opus 5
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 1st of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 25 Jul 2026.
Claude Sonnet 5
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 1st of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 1 Jul 2026.
Claude Opus 4.8
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 20th of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 29 May 2026.
Claude Opus 4.7
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 20th of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 17 Apr 2026.
Claude Opus 4.6
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 20th of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 6 Feb 2026.
Claude Sonnet 4.6
Holding steady on the 24-hour boards (joint 20th of 24 on Combined); detectors armed on coding, reasoning and tool use with no detection; tracked since 18 Feb 2026.

Places are the leaderboard's own: walking down a board, a model joins the group above it unless that group's leader is ahead by more than the measurement can resolve, so “joint” places are normal. A detector is armed once it has ten days of daily medians on the current test version; it fires only on a sustained fall, never on one bad run. Every Claude model has its own page with its history, and all of them are on Anthropic models.

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02

Has Claude been downgraded, or is it down?

Two different questions, answered by two different instruments.

Down is availability: every 10 minutes we send one short completion to api.anthropic.com on our own key and record whether it answered, how fast, and whose fault a failure was — the provider's, our account's, the probe's or our server's. Downgraded is quality: the scores and detectors above, from fixed tasks the API did answer. A model can be fully available and quietly worse, or briefly unavailable and unchanged.

We measure the API (api.anthropic.com), not the consumer app. The Claude app is not the Anthropic API: we probe the API, which is what applications and the Smart Router call.

Status
Answering
Answered
100% of checks in the last 24 hours · 100% over the last 7 days
Median response
1,172 ms to one short completion on our own key
Last checked
26 Oct 2026, 11:20 UTC · checked every 10 minutes

The 7-day history and every episode are on Anthropic API status; all six providers are on the status hub. When a provider stops answering, the Smart Router's fallback order moves traffic to the next model on the board.

03

Claude Code feels dumber — the tool or the model?

Claude Code is a harness around the model: a system prompt, a tool set, context management and a client version that changes often. AI Stupid Level does not test the harness. It calls the Anthropic API at api.anthropic.com with fixed tasks — the same prompts and the same output budget every time, coding every four hours — so the scores above describe the model as served, with nothing of yours in between.

That makes the scores a control. If the API-side scores hold and the detectors stay quiet while Claude Code feels worse, the change is on the tool side: the harness, the context it assembles, or a session that has grown long enough to hurt (see context rot). If the model behind the name changes, it shows up here, on the same tasks, inside the detector's confirmation window.

04

What changed in the record

Dated, past-tense changes in this family from the test record, September 2025 to September 2026: the same tasks before and after, with the values.

· Claude 3.7 Sonnet
Endpoint withdrawn: answering → HTTP 404 from 19 Feb 2026. Its last successful run and its first 404 fell on the same day.

Withdrawals are read from the per-call record: a last successful call, then HTTP 404 on every later attempt. Every row, with its dates and how it was derived, is in What 13 months of monitoring LLM APIs caught.

The whole record, every vendor, is on Is your AI getting worse?; the method and its measured false-alarm rate are in How often our drift detector is wrong, measured.

05

How we tell a real change from noise

Page-Hinkley change-point detection (a CUSUM-family test) run per suite on each model’s daily median, constants published: δ 0.01; λ 0.30 for coding and reasoning, λ 0.50 held for three consecutive daily runs for tool use; detectors run on daily medians and are armed after ten days on the current test version, so a real shift is confirmed over days, not hours. An hourly canary of two fixed probes catches sharp drops with Welch’s t-test (12-point fall, p < 0.01).

Every score carries a standard error from its own run-to-run repeatability; models whose lead is inside that noise share a place, and a composite is labelled with how many suites contributed. A prompt a provider declines is recorded as a refusal with the provider's stated category and that session's score is withheld, never imputed, so a tightened filter shows as a refusal rate rather than as invented incapability.

The detector, its constants and its measured false-alarm rate are on AI drift detection and in the methodology. The methodology is public — every weight, statistical test and drift constant. The test tasks are private, so no lab can train on them.

06

What to do

Watch the Claude models you depend on and let the boards do the checking: an email when a watched model’s coding score falls five points below a week earlier, and a weekly summary of what moved. If you build on the API, the Smart Router sends each request to the model that scores best for it across every vendor on the board and is drift-aware by default, on your own provider keys.

Watch a Claude model

Three models free · an email when a watched model’s coding score falls five points below a week earlier, and a weekly summary of what moved

Route around a model that drifts

The Smart Router routes around a model that drifts · 1,000 requests a month free · no card

The same question for the other families: Is ChatGPT getting worse?, Is Gemini getting worse? and Is DeepSeek getting worse?. Every model on the board, with the whole record, is on Is your AI getting worse?; the Claude models' scores, prices and head-to-head pages are on Anthropic models.

07

Questions people ask about Claude

Is Claude getting worse?

Over the last 24 hours none of the 9 Claude models we track is below its recent baseline on any board, and no drift detector has fired. The verdict reads the 24-hour boards and the per-suite Page-Hinkley detectors for every Claude model on the board, re-tested on the same schedule as every other vendor's models: coding every four hours, reasoning and tool use daily, with an hourly canary probe. The model-by-model table is at the top of this page.

Is Claude nerfed?

A nerf is a deliberate change that cuts a model's cost or capability. From outside, intent is invisible; behaviour is not. Over the last 24 hours none of the 9 Claude models we track is below its recent baseline on any board, and no drift detector has fired. A sustained fall on fixed tasks is what the per-suite Page-Hinkley detector is built to confirm over days; a single bad answer is not evidence, because model output varies run to run even when nothing has changed. Deliberate or not, a change behind a stable model name shows here as a change.

Why does Claude seem dumber in long sessions?

Because a long conversation gives the model a different problem: more context to hold, more of it stale, and the facts that matter buried in the middle. Our boards use short, fixed tasks, so they separate a change in the model from a long-session effect. How accuracy falls as the context grows — finding, linking, tracking and counting facts from 8K to 1M tokens, graded exactly — is measured on context rot.

How often do you test Claude?

Every Claude model on the board gets the same tasks on the same schedule as every other vendor's models: coding every four hours, reasoning and tool use daily, with an hourly canary probe. 9 Claude models are tracked; the longest-tracked has been on the board since 6 Feb 2026. The methodology is public — every weight, statistical test and drift constant. The test tasks are private, so no lab can train on them. Every weight is on the methodology page.

Can I get an alert when Claude changes?

Yes. Free account: every ranking over 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, a 3-model watchlist with email alerts, 1,000 routed requests a month and a Data API key. No card. The watchlist sends an email when a watched model’s coding score falls five points below a week earlier, and a weekly summary of what moved; paid plans tune the threshold and watch more models. Each Claude model's page has a watch button, and the watchlist holds them together.

Do you test Claude Code itself?

No. We test the Anthropic API at api.anthropic.com, on our own account, with fixed tasks: what an application or the Smart Router calls, with nothing of ours in between. Claude Code adds its own prompt, tools and context on top of the model, which we do not see. A model that holds steady here while Claude Code feels worse points at that layer, or at a session that has grown long; see context rot and the Anthropic API status.

Know the next time Claude changes

Free account: every ranking over 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days, a 3-model watchlist with email alerts, 1,000 routed requests a month and a Data API key. No card.

Watch a Claude model

Three models free · an email when a watched model’s coding score falls five points below a week earlier, and a weekly summary of what moved

Route around a model that drifts

The Smart Router is drift-aware by default, on your own provider keys · 1,000 requests a month free