> To claim to know a company's strategy as an outsider is messy stuff.

I said "it seems like". Obviously, I have no idea whether this is an intentional strategy or not and it could as well be a side effect of those things that you mentioned.

Models being "worse" is the perceived effect for the end user (subjectively, it seems like the price to achieve the same results on similar tasks with Opus has been steadily increasing). I am claiming that there is no incentive for Anthropic to address this issue because of their business model (maximize the amount of tokens spent and price per token).