Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3

Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3 by cma on Monday November 09, 2026 @03:42PM (#50431778)

I think the bug one wasn't bad intent, but it was a fact that even without the bug you got different behavior with the approximate logit sampling on TPUs. I say that was jut a minor platform optimization though and wouldn't be too upset about them not disclosing it.

But the harness one was not just a random harness regression; they were getting a huge influx of users and pretty clearly did it to save capacity. Not a great thing when you might be relying on attention to those thinking traces to reduce the risk of prompt injection etc. and it could have gone beyond major task degradation into a safety/security issue.

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Re:Is Opus 5.5 nerfed? Thinking patterns changed on November 3 by Rapzid on Monday November 09, 2026 @04:06PM (#50432138)

Yeah, perhaps but they are also trying to make the harnesses more efficient so they are competitive with their competitors on efficiency. Reducing token use can also reduce context size and improve aligned accuracy in general..

Through the lens of a conspiracy theory this could be viewed narrowly as "cheating" their users to reduce load.

But there are other motivations for the constant work going on in the harnesses that paint a fuller picture.

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