Stella Laurenzo, AMD's AI director, has publicly criticized Anthropic's Claude Code as "unusable" for complex engineering. An analysis of over 6,800 sessions revealed a 73% drop in thinking depth and a 70% decline in code reading since a March 2026 update. Anthropic attributed the changes to a new "adaptive thinking" feature. The incident highlights growing concerns over silent AI model updates that degrade performance and erode developer trust.
Claude chatbot capabilities
- ▪The analysis also found that API costs for the AMD team's usage increased 122-fold, from $12 per day to $1,504.
- ▪Anthropic advised users they can request longer thinking time by setting "effort=high" in their settings.
- ▪A separate bug since March 23, 2026, has been draining user usage quotas 10-20 times faster than normal across all paid tiers.
- ▪On March 31, 2026, Anthropic accidentally exposed the full TypeScript source code for its Claude Code CLI tool via a source map file on the npm registry.
- ▪Stella Laurenzo, AMD's director of AI, publicly stated that Anthropic's Claude Code is "unusable for complex engineering tasks."
- ▪Anthropic responded that the redaction feature only hides reasoning from the UI and does not reduce it, and that a new "adaptive thinking" feature was introduced.
- ▪An analysis by Laurenzo's team of 6,852 sessions showed Claude Code's median thinking depth dropped 73% and its code reading before editing fell 70% since February 2026.
- ▪Laurenzo attributed the performance drop to the early March 2026 deployment of version 2.1.69, which introduced "thinking content redaction."
Anthropic founding mission
- ▪Anthropic trains its Claude models on a "constitution" inspired by documents like the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be "helpful, honest, and harmless."
- ▪Anthropic was founded in 2021 by seven former OpenAI employees with a mission to create an AI startup focused on safety.
Claude versus ChatGPT competition
- ▪Six months prior to the criticism, Stella Laurenzo stated that Claude "stood alone in terms of reasoning quality and execution" but that competitors are catching up.
- ▪Anthropic is a major rival to OpenAI, though it initially focused on enterprise applications while OpenAI targeted the consumer market with ChatGPT.
Claude Code enterprise adoption
- ▪Anthropic has more than 1,000 enterprise customers who each pay over $1 million annually.
- ▪In the same week as the criticism, Anthropic announced a $21 billion TPU deal with Google and Broadcom.
- ▪Following the performance issues, Stella Laurenzo's team at AMD switched to a different provider for AI coding assistance.
Story comments
Loading comments…