I doubt Anthropic are quantizing their own models. Since effort levels are essentially a compute budget I wonder if they’re using this behind the scenes to dial it down when getting close to capacity. Thinking blocks are hidden so we wouldn’t be able to tell right?

From Anthropic's POV it would be better to sneakily nerf the effort level and have some people whine on reddit, than hit capacity and have potentially thousands of customers unable to use the service they're paying for.