On the 10th of June, Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that governments should have the legal power to block dangerous AI deployments. Two days later, on the 12th at 5:21pm Eastern, the US Commerce Department used that exact power on him. It ordered Anthropic to cut off all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, anywhere in the world, citing national security. There was no way to comply selectively, so Anthropic pulled both models for everyone, paying customers included.
Claude Code fell off a cliff these last few weeks. Anyone actually using it felt the drop: dumber edits, lost context, contradictions, the works. No, we weren’t imagining it.
Well, Anthropic has finally spoken and said what many of us already knew weeks ago. From their incident post on September 8:
Investigating - Last week, we opened an incident to investigate degraded quality in some Claude model responses. We found two separate issues that we’ve now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for any ongoing quality issues, including reports of degradation for Claude Opus 4.1.
I like good tools as much as anyone, but the last couple of weeks around Anthropic’s Claude 4 family have been a reminder that you can’t build your working life on shifting sand. Models change, limits move, and entire features wobble without much notice. Useful? Absolutely. Dependable enough to be your only plan? Not even close.
If you’ve been anywhere near Claude lately you’ve probably felt the turbulence. Some days are fine; other days you’re staring at elevated errors, partial outages, or features that feel half-broken. Claude Code in particular has been hot-and-cold: one session will cruise through a tricky refactor, and the next will cough, forget context, or hit a wall with token and usage limits. That volatility isn’t new in AI land, but the frequency and breadth of issues recently has been hard to ignore.