To my eye, gaslighting is a serious accusation. Wikipedia's first line matches how I think of it: "Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality."

Did I miss something? I'm only looking at primary sources to start. Not Reddit. Not The Register. Official company communications.

Did Anthropic tell users i.e. "you are wrong, your experience is not worse."? If so, that would reach the bar of gaslighting, as I understand it (and I'm not alone). If you have a different understanding, please share what it is so I understand what you mean.

I'd rather not speak too poorly of Anthropic, because - to the extent I can bring myself to like a tech company - I like Anthropic.

That said, the copy uses "we never intentionally degrade our models" to mean something like "we never degrade one facet of our models unless it improves some other facet of our models". This is a cop out, because it is what users suspected and complained about. What users want - regardless of whether it is realistic to expect - is for Anthropic to buy even more compute than Anthropic already does, so that the models remain equally smart even if the service demand increases.

They didn’t say “your experience is not worse” but they did frequently say “just turn reasoning effort back up and it will be fine”. And that pretty explicitly invalidates all the (correct) feedback which said it’s not just reasoning effort.

They knew they had deliberately made their system worse, despite their lame promise published today that they would never do such a thing. And so they incorrectly assumed that their ham fisted policy blunder was the only problem.

Still plenty I prefer about Claude over GPT but this really stings.