In early 2025, Anthropic launched Claude Code, a tool that quickly gained popularity among developers and enterprise engineering teams. However, by April 2026, users reported significant performance declines, including collapsed output quality and erratic functionality. Complaints surged as users expressed dissatisfaction with the company's slow response to their concerns, leading some to cancel their subscriptions. Anthropic attributed these issues to the rapid growth in demand, which had overstretched their infrastructure during peak hours. Users felt deceived by what they perceived as a lack of transparency in communications regarding the tool's problems. Amid the scrutiny, Anthropic claimed their changes to Claude Code aimed to enhance latency and address user feedback regarding token utilization. Despite this, user trust eroded, further fueled by a perception that the company was implementing stealth price hikes. Users voiced frustrations online, with some describing their experience with the coding tool as gaslighting. Notable figures in the tech community echoed these concerns, arguing that the quality of output was dangerously degraded, particularly for complex coding tasks. As a response to deteriorating application performance and heightened demand for their tools, Anthropic unveiled measures to alleviate pressure on their systems, including the introduction of usage limits during peak hours. The situation gave rise to speculations that their compute resources were falling short compared to competitors. OpenAI's revenue chief suggested that failing to secure adequate computing power could be a critical misstep for Anthropic. The growing dissatisfaction among power users and security professionals concerning Claude Code's performance led to alarming sentiments in the community. They expressed concerns that sluggish and unreliable output could have dire implications for cybersecurity and software development. With no clear subscription figures disclosed and contrasting reports of user growth for the Claude app, Anthropic found itself in a precarious position, particularly as OpenAI introduced their latest AI model, GPT-5.5, underscoring the competitive landscape in AI development.