It's become increasingly clear that something is wrong at Anthropic. What many developers and users initially dismissed as subjective experience or a "skill issue" has been confirmed as a systemic failure: Anthropic's AI models have been demonstrably "dumber" and less reliable for weeks, a problem compounded by frequent and severe service outages.
This wasn't a minor hiccup. According to Anthropic's own belated admissions, a series of cascading bugs plagued their models, leading to a significant crisis of confidence among their user base.
The Two-Fold Crisis: Downtime and Degradation
Anthropic's problems can be split into two alarming categories:
- Chronic Downtime: The Claude.ai website has a shockingly low uptime of 99.24%, meaning users face a nearly 1% chance of the service being down at any given time. The API is only marginally better. These aren't just blips; they are prolonged outages that render the platform unusable for critical applications.
- Degraded Intelligence: Far more insidious is the decline in model quality. Users reported that models like Claude Opus and Sonnet 4 were providing lower-quality, malformed, or less intelligent responses. This wasn't just a feeling; it was the result of multiple, overlapping bugs that Anthropic failed to detect for an extended period.
"We found and resolved two issues that were affecting quality in some Claude responses." - Anthropic Official Statement
This carefully worded statement, released days after the fix, downplays a month-long issue that severely impacted users and the perceived capability of their flagship models.
A Timeline of a Meltdown
The issues began in early August and spiraled into a multi-week failure of both technology and communication:
- August 5th, 2025: A bug is introduced that begins degrading the quality of Claude Sonnet 4 requests. It goes unnoticed.
- August 25th: After widespread user complaints, Anthropic finally opens an incident to investigate degraded quality in Claude Opus.
- August 28th: Anthropic claims to have resolved the Opus issue.
- August 29th - September 4th: In their attempt to fix Opus, they seemingly introduce a worse bug, causing the impact of the original Sonnet 4 bug to "increase."
- September 4th: The Sonnet 4 bug is finally resolved.
- Post-Resolution: Only after fixing the problems does Anthropic offer a vague acknowledgment, leaving users in the dark for weeks.
Behind the Curtain: A Culture of Misplaced Priorities?
Why did this happen? The speaker speculates it stems from Anthropic's internal priorities. Unlike OpenAI, which publicly prioritizes its paying ChatGPT users, Anthropic appears to be in a constant struggle to allocate its precious GPU resources between three competing demands:
- API & Claude.ai (Production): Serving paying customers.
- Research: Training the next generation of models.
- Efficiency: Pushing updates to make models run cheaper and faster.
This aggressive push for efficiency and the prioritization of internal research over production stability may have led to rushed, poorly tested rollouts that compromised model quality. The company's focus seems to be on winning the model race, not on providing a reliable service.
The Developer's Playbook: Surviving Anthropic's Instability
For developers relying on Anthropic, the official API has proven to be a single point of failure. The recommended strategy is to decouple from Anthropic's direct infrastructure.
The solution is to use a service like Open Router.
Open Router acts as a smart layer that can route API calls to various endpoints where Claude models are hosted, including more stable platforms like AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI. If Anthropic's native API goes down, Open Router can automatically failover to a working provider, ensuring your application remains online.
A Call for Transparency
The core of the frustration lies not just in the technical failures, but in the communication breakdown. While OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman will publicly tweet about outages and explain what broke, Anthropic remains opaque. They offer vague statements long after the fact, failing to provide details on the root cause or steps to prevent recurrence.
To rebuild the trust it has lost, Anthropic must move beyond its "weird vibes" and embrace a culture of transparency. Until then, users and developers are right to be skeptical and must build their own resilience against a platform that has proven to be fundamentally unreliable.
标题： Anthropic 的危机：“智能降级”与长期宕机如何侵蚀信任
摘要： 深入探讨 Anthropic 近期的动荡，揭示其 Claude 模型因连锁 bug 而遭受长达一个月的“智能降级”。我们分析了该平台的长期宕机问题、与竞争对手相比严重缺乏透明度的现状，以及开发者可以如何保护自己的应用免受这种不稳定性的影响。
内容：
越来越明显，Anthropic 公司出问题了。许多开发者和用户最初认为是主观体验或“技术问题”的情况，现已被证实是一次系统性失败：Anthropic 的 AI 模型在数周内表现得明显“更笨”且可靠性更差，而频繁且严重的服务中断更是雪上加霜。
这并非一次小小的失误。根据 Anthropic 自己姗姗来迟的承认，一系列连锁 bug 困扰了他们的模型，导致其用户群中出现了严重的信任危机。
双重危机：宕机与性能降级
Anthropic 的问题可以分为两个令人警惕的类别：
- 长期宕机： Claude.ai 网站的正常运行时间低得惊人，仅为 99.24%，这意味着用户在任何时候都有近 1% 的概率遇到服务中断。其 API 的情况也仅是略好一些。这些不仅仅是瞬间的故障，而是长时间的宕机，使平台无法用于关键应用。
- 智能降级： 更为隐蔽的是模型质量的下降。用户报告称，像 Claude Opus 和 Sonnet 4 这样的模型提供的回应质量更低、格式错误或智能程度下降。这不仅仅是一种感觉，而是由多个重叠的 bug 导致的，而 Anthropic 在很长一段时间内都未能发现这些问题。
“我们发现并解决了两个影响部分 Claude 回应质量的问题。” —— Anthropic 官方声明
这份在修复问题数天后才发布的、措辞谨慎的声明，轻描淡写了一个持续一个月、严重影响用户及其旗舰模型感知能力的问题。
一场崩溃的时间线
问题始于八月初，并迅速演变成一场持续数周的技术与沟通的双重失败：
- 2025年8月5日： 一个 bug 被引入，开始降低 Claude Sonnet 4 请求的质量。该问题未被发现。
- 8月25日： 在广泛的用户抱怨后，Anthropic 终于立项调查 Claude Opus 的质量下降问题。
- 8月28日： Anthropic 声称已解决 Opus 的问题。
- 8月29日 - 9月4日： 在尝试修复 Opus 的过程中，他们似乎引入了一个更糟糕的 bug，导致最初 Sonnet 4 bug 的影响“加剧”。
- 9月4日： Sonnet 4 的 bug 最终被解决。
- 解决之后： 直到问题修复后，Anthropic 才提供了一个模糊的承认，让用户在数周内都被蒙在鼓里。
幕后探因：错误的优先级文化？
这一切为何会发生？演讲者推测，这源于 Anthropic 的内部优先级。与公开将付费 ChatGPT 用户放在首位的 OpenAI 不同，Anthropic 似乎在不断地为其宝贵的 GPU 资源在三个相互竞争的需求之间进行分配而挣扎：
- API & Claude.ai (生产环境): 服务付费客户。
- 研究: 训练下一代模型。
- 效率: 推送更新以使模型运行成本更低、速度更快。
这种对效率的激进追求以及将内部研究置于生产稳定性之上的做法，可能导致了仓促、测试不足的部署，从而损害了模型质量。该公司的重点似乎是赢得模型竞赛，而不是提供可靠的服务。
开发者的应对策略：在 Anthropic 的不稳定性中求生
对于依赖 Anthropic 的开发者来说，其官方 API 已被证明是一个单点故障。推荐的策略是与 Anthropic 的直接基础设施解耦。
解决方案是使用像 Open Router 这样的服务。
Open Router 作为一个智能中间层，可以将 API 调用路由到托管 Claude 模型的不同端点，包括像 AWS Bedrock 和 Google Vertex AI 这样更稳定的平台。如果 Anthropic 的原生 API 宕机，Open Router 可以自动故障转移到一个可用的提供商，确保您的应用保持在线。
呼唤透明度
挫败感的核心不仅在于技术故障，更在于沟通的崩溃。当 OpenAI 的 CEO Sam Altman 会在推特上公开讨论宕机并解释故障原因时，Anthropic 却保持着不透明。他们在事后很久才发布模糊的声明，未能提供根本原因的细节或防止再次发生的措施。
为了重建已失去的信任，Anthropic 必须超越其“诡异的氛围”，拥抱一种透明的文化。在此之前，用户和开发者有理由保持怀疑，并且必须建立自己的弹性，以应对这个已被证明根本不可靠的平台。