> When was the last time they declined your subscription because they have no compute?
Is that a serious question? There have been a bunch of obvious signs in recent weeks they are significantly compute constrained and current revenue isn't adequate ranging from myriad reports of model regression ('Claude is getting dumber/slower') to today's announcement which first claims 4.7 the same price as 4.6 but later discloses "the same input can map to more tokens—roughly 1.0–1.35× depending on the content type. Second, Opus 4.7 thinks more at higher effort levels, particularly on later turns in agentic settings. This improves its reliability on hard problems, but it does mean it produces more output tokens" and "we’ve raised the default effort level to xhigh for all plans" and disclosing that all images are now processed at higher resolution which uses a lot more tokens.
In addition to the changes in performance, usage and consumption costs users can see, people say they are 'optimizing' opaque under-the-hood parameters as well. Hell, I'm still just a light user of their free web chat (Sonnet 4.6) and even that started getting noticeably slower/dumber a few weeks ago. Over months of casual use I ran into their free tier limits exactly twice. In the past week I've hit them every day, despite being especially light-use days. Two days ago the free web chat was overloaded for a couple hours ("Claude is unavailable now. Try again later"). Yesterday, I hit the free limit after literally five questions, two were revising an 8 line JS script and and three were on current news.
