New model - that explains why for the past week/two weeks I had this feeling of 4.6 being much less "intelligent". I hope this is only some kind of paranoia and we (and investors) are not being played by the big corp. /s
Now as for why, I imagine that it's just money. Anthropic presumably just got done training Mythos and Opus 4.7. that must have cost a lot of cash. They have a lot of subscribers and users, but not enough hardware.
What's a little further tweaking of the model when you've already had to dumb it down due to constraints.