They're A/B testing on the latest opus model, sometimes it's good sometimes it's worse than sonnet annoying as hell. I think they trigger it when you have excessive usage or high context use.
Or maybe when usage is high they tweak a setting that use cache when it shouldn't.
For all we know they do whatever experiment the want, to demonstrate theoretical better margin, to analyse user patterns when a performance drop occur.
Given what is done in other industries which don't face an existential issue, it wouldn't surprise me some whistle blowers in a few years tell us what's been going on.
