The DeepSeek API uses an API for­mat com­pat­i­ble with OpenAI/Anthropic. By mod­i­fy­ing the con­fig­u­ra­tion, you can use the OpenAI/Anthropic SDK or soft­wares com­pat­i­ble with the OpenAI/Anthropic API to ac­cess the DeepSeek API.

* The model names deepseek-chat and deepseek-rea­soner will be dep­re­cated on 2026/07/24. For com­pat­i­bil­ity, they cor­re­spond to the non-think­ing mode and think­ing mode of deepseek-v4-flash, re­spec­tively.

Invoke The Chat API​

Once you have ob­tained an API key, you can ac­cess the DeepSeek model us­ing the fol­low­ing ex­am­ple scripts in the OpenAI API for­mat. This is a non-stream ex­am­ple, you can set the stream pa­ra­me­ter to true to get stream re­sponse.

For ex­am­ples us­ing the Anthropic API for­mat, please re­fer to Anthropic API.

curl

python

nodejs

curl https://​api.deepseek.com/​chat/​com­ple­tions \ -H “Content-Type: ap­pli­ca­tion/​json” \ -H “Authorization: Bearer ${DEEPSEEK_API_KEY}” \ -d ‘{ “model”: “deepseek-v4-pro”, “messages”: [ {“role”: “system”, “content”: “You are a help­ful as­sis­tant.“}, {“role”: “user”, “content”: “Hello!“} ], “thinking”: {“type”: “enabled”}, “reasoning_effort”: “high”, “stream”: false }’

It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s sec­ond term for Palantir em­ploy­ees to ques­tion their com­pa­ny’s com­mit­ments to civil lib­er­ties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to be­come the tech­no­log­i­cal back­bone of Trump’s im­mi­gra­tion en­force­ment ma­chin­ery, pro­vid­ing soft­ware iden­ti­fy­ing, track­ing, and help­ing de­port im­mi­grants on be­half of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when cur­rent and for­mer em­ploy­ees started ring­ing the alarm.

Around that time, two for­mer em­ploy­ees re­con­nected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you track­ing Palantir’s de­scent into fas­cism?”

“That was their greet­ing,” the other for­mer em­ployee says. “There’s this feel­ing not of ‘Oh, this is un­pop­u­lar and hard,’ but, ‘This feels wrong.’”

Palantir was founded—with ini­tial ven­ture cap­i­tal in­vest­ment from the CIA—at a mo­ment of na­tional con­sen­sus fol­low­ing the September 11, 2001 at­tacks, when many saw fight­ing ter­ror­ism abroad as the most crit­i­cal mis­sion fac­ing the US. The com­pany, which was co­founded by tech bil­lion­aire Peter Thiel, sells soft­ware that acts as a high-pow­ered data ag­gre­ga­tion and analy­sis tool pow­er­ing every­thing from pri­vate busi­nesses to the US mil­i­tary’s tar­get­ing sys­tems.

For the last 20 years, em­ploy­ees could ac­cept the in­tense ex­ter­nal crit­i­cism and awk­ward con­ver­sa­tions with fam­ily and friends about work­ing for a com­pany named af­ter J. R. R. Tolkien’s cor­rupt­ing all-see­ing orb. But a year into Trump’s sec­ond term, as Palantir deep­ens its re­la­tion­ship with an ad­min­is­tra­tion many work­ers fear is wreak­ing havoc at home, em­ploy­ees are fi­nally rais­ing these con­cerns in­ter­nally, as the US’s war on im­mi­grants, war in Iran, and even com­pany-re­leased man­i­festos has forced them to re­think the role they play in it all.

“We hire the best and bright­est tal­ent to help de­fend America and its al­lies and to build and de­ploy our soft­ware to help gov­ern­ments and busi­nesses around the world. Palantir is no mono­lith of be­lief, nor should we be,” a Palantir spokesper­son said in a state­ment. “We all pride our­selves on a cul­ture of fierce in­ter­nal di­a­logue and even dis­agree­ment over the com­plex ar­eas we work on. That has been true from our found­ing and re­mains true to­day.”

“The broad story of Palantir as told to it­self and to em­ploy­ees was that com­ing out of 9/11 we knew that there was go­ing to be this big push for safety, and we were wor­ried that that safety might in­fringe on civil lib­er­ties,” one for­mer em­ployee tells WIRED. “And now the threat’s com­ing from within. I think there’s a bit of an iden­tity cri­sis and a bit of a chal­lenge. We were sup­posed to be the ones who were pre­vent­ing a lot of these abuses. Now we’re not pre­vent­ing them. We seem to be en­abling them.”

Palantir has al­ways had a se­cre­tive rep­u­ta­tion, for­bid­ding em­ploy­ees from speak­ing to the press and re­quir­ing alumni to sign non-dis­par­age­ment agree­ments. But through­out the com­pa­ny’s his­tory, man­age­ment has al­ways at least ap­peared to be open to en­gage­ment and in­ter­nal crit­i­cism, mul­ti­ple em­ploy­ees say. Over the last year, how­ever, much of that feed­back has been met by philo­soph­i­cal so­lil­o­quies and redi­rec­tion. “It’s never been re­ally that peo­ple are afraid of speak­ing up against Karp. It’s more a ques­tion of what it would do, if any­thing,” one cur­rent em­ployee tells WIRED.

While in­ter­nal ten­sions within Palantir have grown over the last year, they reached a boil­ing point in January af­ter the vi­o­lent killing of Alex Pretti, a nurse who was shot and killed by fed­eral agents dur­ing protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis. Employees from across the com­pany com­mented in a Slack thread ded­i­cated to the news de­mand­ing more in­for­ma­tion about the com­pa­ny’s re­la­tion­ship with ICE from man­age­ment and CEO Alex Karp.

“Our in­volve­ment with ice has been in­ter­nally swept un­der the rug un­der Trump2 too much,” one per­son wrote in a Slack mes­sage WIRED re­ported at the time. “We need an un­der­stand­ing of our in­volve­ment here.”

Around this time, Palantir started wip­ing Slack con­ver­sa­tions af­ter seven days in at least one chan­nel where most of the in­ter­nal de­bate takes place, #palantir-in-the-news. Because the de­ci­sion was­n’t for­mally an­nounced be­fore the pol­icy rolled out, one worker who no­ticed the dele­tions asked in the chan­nel why the com­pany was re­mov­ing “relevant in­ter­nal dis­course on cur­rent events.”

A mem­ber of Palantir’s cy­ber­se­cu­rity team re­sponded, writ­ing that the de­ci­sion was made in re­sponse to leaks.

This pe­riod led Palantir man­age­ment to re­lease an up­dated wiki, or a col­lec­tion of blog posts ex­plain­ing the ICE con­tract, where the com­pany de­fended its work with DHS. Management wrote that the tech­nol­ogy the com­pany pro­vides “is mak­ing a dif­fer­ence in mit­i­gat­ing risks while en­abling tar­geted out­comes.”

Palantir man­age­ment ran de­fense by hold­ing a hand­ful of AMA (ask me any­thing) fo­rums across the com­pany with lead­er­ship like chief tech­nol­ogy of­fi­cer Shyam Sankar and mem­bers of its pri­vacy and civil lib­er­ties (PCL) teams.

At least one of these AMAs was or­ga­nized in­de­pen­dently of PCL lead­er­ship by two team leads, in­clud­ing one who worked di­rectly on the ICE con­tract for a pe­riod of time. “This was very rogue,” a PCL em­ployee who worked on the ICE con­tract said in a February AMA, a record­ing of which was ob­tained by WIRED. “Courtney [Bowman, head of the pri­vacy and civil lib­er­ties team] does­n’t know that I’m spend­ing three hours this week talk­ing to IMPLs [Palantir ter­mi­nol­ogy for its client-fac­ing prod­uct teams], but I think this is the only real way to start go­ing in the right di­rec­tion.”

Throughout the lengthy call, em­ploy­ees work­ing on a va­ri­ety of Palantir’s de­fense pro­jects posed hard ques­tions. Could ICE agents delete au­dit logs in Palantir’s soft­ware? Could agents cre­ate harm­ful work­flows on their own with­out the com­pa­ny’s help? What is the most ma­li­cious thing that could come out of this work?

Answering these ques­tions, the PCL em­ployee who worked on the ICE con­tract said that “a suf­fi­ciently ma­li­cious cus­tomer is, like, ba­si­cally im­pos­si­ble to pre­vent at the mo­ment” and could only be con­trolled through “auditing to prove what hap­pened” and le­gal ac­tion af­ter the fact if the cus­tomer breached the com­pa­ny’s con­tract.

At one point dur­ing the call, one of the em­ploy­ees tried to level with the group, ex­plain­ing that Palantir’s work with ICE was a pri­or­ity for Karp and some­thing that likely would­n’t change any time soon.

“Karp re­ally wants to do this and con­tin­u­ously wants this,” they said. “We’re largely at the role of try­ing to give him sug­ges­tions and try­ing to redi­rect him, but it was largely un­suc­cess­ful and we seem to be on a very sharp path of con­tin­u­ing to ex­pand this work­flow.”

Around the time of these fo­rums, Karp sat down for a pre­re­corded in­ter­view with Bowman, seem­ingly to dis­cuss Palantir’s con­tracts with ICE, but re­fused to broach the topic di­rectly. Instead, Karp sug­gested that em­ploy­ees in­ter­ested in the work sign nondis­clo­sure agree­ments be­fore re­ceiv­ing more de­tailed in­for­ma­tion.

Then came the deadly February 28 mis­sile strike on an Iranian el­e­men­tary school on the first full day of the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion and Israel’s war in Iran. The US is the only known coun­try in the con­flict to use that spe­cific type of mis­sile. More than 120 chil­dren were killed when a Tomahawk mis­sile struck the school, kick­ing off a se­ries of in­ves­ti­ga­tions that con­cluded that the US was re­spon­si­ble and that sur­veil­lance tools like Palantir’s Maven sys­tem had been used dur­ing that day’s strikes. For a com­pany full of em­ploy­ees al­ready reel­ing over its work with ICE, pos­si­ble in­volve­ment in the death of chil­dren was a break­ing point.

“I guess the root of what I’m ask­ing is … were we in­volved, and are do­ing any­thing to stop a re­peat if we were,” one em­ployee asked in the Palantir news Slack chan­nel. Some em­ploy­ees posed sim­i­lar ques­tions in the thread, while oth­ers crit­i­cized them for dis­cussing what could be con­sid­ered clas­si­fied in­for­ma­tion in a Slack chan­nel open to the en­tire com­pany. The in­ves­ti­ga­tion is on­go­ing.

The Palantir spokesper­son said the com­pany was “proud” to sup­port the US mil­i­tary “across Democratic and Republican ad­min­is­tra­tions.”

In March, Karp gave an in­ter­view to CNBC claim­ing that AI could un­der­mine the power of “humanities-trained—largely Democratic—voters” and in­crease the power of work­ing-class male vot­ers. While crit­ics re­acted to the piece, call­ing the state­ments con­cern­ing, so did em­ploy­ees in­ter­nally: “Is it true that AI dis­rup­tion is go­ing to dis­pro­por­tion­ately neg­a­tively af­fect women and peo­ple who vote Democrat? and if it is, why are we cool with that?” one worker asked on Slack in a chan­nel ded­i­cated to news about Palantir.

Palantir’s lead­er­ship in­censed work­ers yet again this week af­ter the com­pany posted a Saturday af­ter­noon man­i­festo re­duc­ing Karp’s re­cent book, The Technological Republic, to 22 points. The post—which in­cludes many of Karp’s long-stand­ing be­liefs on how Silicon Valley could bet­ter serve US na­tional in­ter­ests—goes as far as sug­gest­ing that the US should con­sider re­in­stat­ing the draft. Critics called the man­i­festo fas­cist.

Internally, the post alarmed some work­ers who hud­dled in a Slack thread on Monday morn­ing, ques­tion­ing lead­er­ship over its de­ci­sion to post it in the first place.

“I’m cu­ri­ous why this had to be posted. Especially on the com­pany ac­count. On the prac­ti­cal level every time stuff like that gets posted it gets harder for us to sell the soft­ware out­side of the US (for sure in the cur­rent po­lit­i­cal cli­mate), and I doubt we need this in the US?” wrote one frus­trated em­ployee. The mes­sage re­ceived more than 50 “+1” emo­jis.

“Wether [sic] we ac­knowl­edge it or not, this im­pacts us all per­son­ally,” an­other worker wrote on Monday. “I’ve al­ready had mul­ti­ple friends reach out and ask what the hell did we post.” This mes­sage re­ceived nearly two dozen “+1” emoji re­ac­tions.

“Yeah it turns out that short-form sum­maries of the book’s long-form ideas are easy to mis­rep­re­sent. It’s like we taped a ‘kick me’ sign on our own backs,” a third worker wrote. “I hope no one who de­cided to put this out is sur­prised that we are, in fact, get­ting kicked.”

These con­ver­sa­tions in­volv­ing shame and un­cer­tainty from work­ers have seem­ingly popped up in in­ter­nal chan­nels when­ever Palantir has been in the news over the last year. “I think the only thing not dif­fer­ent is a lot of folks are still in­cred­i­bly wary about leaks and talk­ing to the press,” one cur­rent em­ployee tells WIRED, de­scrib­ing how the in­ter­nal com­pany cul­ture has evolved over the last year.

All of this dis­sent does­n’t seem to bother Karp, who re­cently told work­ers that the com­pany is “behind the curve in­ter­nally” when it comes to pop­u­lar­ity. Here, he’s been con­sis­tent; in March 2024 Karp told a CNBC re­porter that “if you have a po­si­tion that does not cost you ever to lose an em­ployee, it’s not a po­si­tion.”

But for em­ploy­ees, the cul­ture shift feels in­ten­tional. “I don’t want to as­sert that I have knowl­edge of what’s go­ing on in their in­ter­nal mind,” one for­mer worker tells WIRED. “But maybe it’s got­ten to a place where en­cour­ag­ing in­de­pen­dent thought and ques­tion­ing leads to some bad con­clu­sions.”

Secure your de­pen­den­cies with us

Socket proac­tively blocks ma­li­cious open source pack­ages in your code.

Socket re­searchers dis­cov­ered that the Bitwarden CLI was com­pro­mised as part of the on­go­ing Check­marx sup­ply chain cam­paign. The open source pass­word man­ager serves more than 10 mil­lion users and over 50,000 busi­nesses, and ranks among among the top three pass­word man­agers by en­ter­prise adop­tion.

The af­fected pack­age ver­sion ap­pears to be @bit­war­den/​cli2026.4.0, and the ma­li­cious code was pub­lished in bw1.js, a file in­cluded in the pack­age con­tents. The at­tack ap­pears to have lever­aged a com­pro­mised GitHub Action in Bitwarden’s CI/CD pipeline, con­sis­tent with the pat­tern seen across other af­fected repos­i­to­ries in this cam­paign.

What we know so far:

Bitwarden CLI builds were af­fected

The com­pro­mise fol­lows the same GitHub Actions sup­ply chain vec­tor iden­ti­fied in the broader Check­marx cam­paign

This is an on­go­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Socket’s se­cu­rity re­search team is con­duct­ing a full tech­ni­cal analy­sis and will pub­lish de­tailed find­ings, in­clud­ing af­fected ver­sions, in­di­ca­tors of com­pro­mise, and re­me­di­a­tion guid­ance.

If you use Bitwarden CLI, we rec­om­mend re­view­ing your CI logs and ro­tat­ing any se­crets that may have been ex­posed to the com­pro­mised work­flow. At this time, the com­pro­mise only in­volves only the npm pack­age for the CLI. Bitwarden’s Chrome ex­ten­sion, MCP server, and other le­git­i­mate dis­tri­b­u­tions have not been af­fected yet.

Technical analy­sis#

The ma­li­cious pay­load was in a file named bw1.js , which shares core in­fra­struc­ture with the Checkmarx mc­pAd­don.js we an­a­lyzed yes­ter­day:

Same C2 end­point: Uses iden­ti­cal au­dit.check­marx[.]cx/​v1/​teleme­try end­point, ob­fus­cated via __decodeScrambled with seed 0x3039. Exfiltration also oc­curs through GitHub API (commit-based) and npm reg­istry (token theft/​re­pub­lish­ing)

Embedded pay­loads: Same gzip+base64 struc­ture con­tain­ing a Python mem­ory-scrap­ing script tar­get­ing GitHub Actions Runner.Worker, a setup.mjs loader for re­pub­lished npm pack­ages, a GitHub Actions work­flow YAML, hard­coded RSA pub­lic keys, and an ide­o­log­i­cal man­i­festo string

Credential har­vest­ing: GitHub to­kens via Runner.Worker mem­ory scrap­ing and en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables, AWS cre­den­tials via ~/.aws/ files and en­vi­ron­ment, Azure to­kens via azd, GCP cre­den­tials via gcloud con­fig con­fig-helper, npm con­fig­u­ra­tion files (.npmrc), SSH keys, en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables, and Claude/MCP con­fig­u­ra­tion files

Github Exfiltration: Public repos­i­to­ries cre­ated un­der vic­tim ac­counts us­ing Dune-themed nam­ing ({word}-{word}-{3digits}), with en­crypted re­sults com­mit­ted and to­kens em­bed­ded in com­mit mes­sages us­ing the marker LongLiveTheResistanceAgainstMachines

Supply chain prop­a­ga­tion: npm to­ken theft to iden­tify writable pack­ages and re­pub­lish with in­jected pre­in­stall hooks, GitHub Actions work­flow in­jec­tion to cap­ture repos­i­tory se­crets

Russian lo­cale kill switch: Exits silently if sys­tem lo­cale be­gins with “ru”, check­ing Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().locale and en­vi­ron­ment vari­ables LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, LANGUAGE, and LANG

Runtime: Bun v1.3.13 in­ter­preter down­loaded from GitHub re­leases

This pay­load (bw1.js)also in­cludes sev­eral in­di­ca­tors not doc­u­mented in the Checkmarx in­ci­dent:

Lock file: Hardcoded path /tmp/tmp.987654321.lock pre­vents mul­ti­ple in­stances from run­ning si­mul­ta­ne­ously

Shell pro­file per­sis­tence: Injects pay­load into ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc

Explicit brand­ing: Repository de­scrip­tion Shai-Hulud: The Third Coming re­places the de­cep­tive “Checkmarx Configuration Storage”, and de­bug strings in­clude “Would be ex­e­cut­ing but­ler­ian ji­had!”

The shared tool­ing strongly sug­gests a con­nec­tion to the same mal­ware ecosys­tem, but the op­er­a­tional sig­na­tures dif­fer in ways that com­pli­cate at­tri­bu­tion. The Checkmarx at­tack was claimed by TeamPCP via the @pcpcats so­cial me­dia ac­count af­ter dis­cov­ery, and the mal­ware it­self at­tempted to blend in with le­git­i­mate-look­ing de­scrip­tions. This pay­load takes a dif­fer­ent ap­proach: the ide­o­log­i­cal brand­ing is em­bed­ded di­rectly in the mal­ware, from the Shai-Hulud repos­i­tory names to the “Butlerian Jihad” man­i­festo pay­load to com­mit mes­sages pro­claim­ing re­sis­tance against ma­chines. This sug­gests ei­ther a dif­fer­ent op­er­a­tor us­ing shared in­fra­struc­ture, a splin­ter group with stronger ide­o­log­i­cal mo­ti­va­tions, or an evo­lu­tion in the cam­paign’s pub­lic pos­ture.

Recommendations#

Organizations that in­stalled the ma­li­cious Bitwarden npm pack­age should treat this in­ci­dent as a cre­den­tial ex­po­sure and CI/CD com­pro­mise event.

Immediately re­move the af­fected pack­age from de­vel­oper sys­tems and build en­vi­ron­ments. Rotate any cre­den­tials that may have been ex­posed to those en­vi­ron­ments, in­clud­ing GitHub to­kens, npm to­kens, cloud cre­den­tials, SSH keys, and CI/CD se­crets. Review GitHub for unau­tho­rized repos­i­tory cre­ation, un­ex­pected work­flow files un­der .github/workflows/, sus­pi­cious work­flow runs, ar­ti­fact down­loads, and pub­lic repos­i­to­ries match­ing the ob­served Dune-themed stag­ing pat­tern ({word}-{word}-{3digits}). Check for the fol­low­ing key­words in newly pub­lished repos­i­to­ries if you be­lieve you may be im­pacted:

atrei­des

cog­i­tor

fe­daykin

fre­men

fu­tar

gesserit

ghola

harkon­nen

heigh­liner

kanly

kral­izec

las­gun

laza

melange

men­tat

nav­i­ga­tor

or­nithopter

phib­ian

powin­dah

prana

pre­scient

sand­worm

sar­daukar

sayyad­ina

si­etch

siri­dar

slig

still­suit

thumper

tleilaxu

Audit npm for unau­tho­rized pub­lishes, ver­sion changes, or newly added in­stall hooks. In cloud en­vi­ron­ments, re­view ac­cess logs for un­usual se­cret ac­cess, to­ken use, and newly is­sued cre­den­tials.

On end­points and run­ners, hunt for out­bound con­nec­tions to the ob­served ex­fil­tra­tion in­fra­struc­ture (audit[.]checkmarx[.]cx), ex­e­cu­tion of Bun where it is not nor­mally used, ac­cess to files such as .npmrc, .git-credentials, .env, cloud cre­den­tial stores, gcloud, az, or azd. Check for the lock file /tmp/tmp.987654321.lock and shell pro­file mod­i­fi­ca­tions in ~/.bashrc and ~/.zshrc. For GitHub Actions, re­view whether any un­ap­proved work­flows were cre­ated on tran­sient branches and whether ar­ti­facts such as for­mat-re­sults.txt were gen­er­ated or down­loaded.

As a longer-term con­trol, re­duce the blast ra­dius of fu­ture sup­ply chain in­ci­dents by lock­ing down to­ken scopes, re­quir­ing short-lived cre­den­tials where pos­si­ble, re­strict­ing who can cre­ate or pub­lish pack­ages, hard­en­ing GitHub Actions per­mis­sions, dis­abling un­nec­es­sary ar­ti­fact ac­cess, and mon­i­tor­ing for new pub­lic repos­i­to­ries or work­flow changes cre­ated out­side nor­mal re­lease processes.

IOCs#

Malicious Package

@bitwarden/cli2026.4.0

Network Indicators

94[.]154[.]172[.]43

https://​au­dit.check­marx[.]cx/​v1/​teleme­try

File System Indicators (Victim Package Compromise)

/tmp/tmp.987654321.lock

/tmp/_tmp_<Unix Epoch Timestamp>/

pack­age-up­dated.tgz

Over the past month, we’ve been look­ing into re­ports that Claude’s re­sponses have wors­ened for some users. We’ve traced these re­ports to three sep­a­rate changes that af­fected Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, and Claude Cowork. The API was not im­pacted.

All three is­sues have now been re­solved as of April 20 (v2.1.116).

In this post, we ex­plain what we found, what we fixed, and what we’ll do dif­fer­ently to en­sure sim­i­lar is­sues are much less likely to hap­pen again.

We take re­ports about degra­da­tion very se­ri­ously. We never in­ten­tion­ally de­grade our mod­els, and we were able to im­me­di­ately con­firm that our API and in­fer­ence layer were un­af­fected.

After in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we iden­ti­fied three dif­fer­ent is­sues:

On March 4, we changed Claude Code’s de­fault rea­son­ing ef­fort from high to medium to re­duce the very long la­tency—enough to make the UI ap­pear frozen—some users were see­ing in high mode. This was the wrong trade­off. We re­verted this change on April 7 af­ter users told us they’d pre­fer to de­fault to higher in­tel­li­gence and opt into lower ef­fort for sim­ple tasks. This im­pacted Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

On March 26, we shipped a change to clear Claude’s older think­ing from ses­sions that had been idle for over an hour, to re­duce la­tency when users re­sumed those ses­sions. A bug caused this to keep hap­pen­ing every turn for the rest of the ses­sion in­stead of just once, which made Claude seem for­get­ful and repet­i­tive. We fixed it on April 10. This af­fected Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6.

On April 16, we added a sys­tem prompt in­struc­tion to re­duce ver­bosity. In com­bi­na­tion with other prompt changes, it hurt cod­ing qual­ity and was re­verted on April 20. This im­pacted Sonnet 4.6, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7.

Because each change af­fected a dif­fer­ent slice of traf­fic on a dif­fer­ent sched­ule, the ag­gre­gate ef­fect looked like broad, in­con­sis­tent degra­da­tion. While we be­gan in­ves­ti­gat­ing re­ports in early March, they were chal­leng­ing to dis­tin­guish from nor­mal vari­a­tion in user feed­back at first, and nei­ther our in­ter­nal us­age nor evals ini­tially re­pro­duced the is­sues iden­ti­fied.

This is­n’t the ex­pe­ri­ence users should ex­pect from Claude Code. As of April 23, we’re re­set­ting us­age lim­its for all sub­scribers.

A change to Claude Code’s de­fault rea­son­ing ef­fort

When we re­leased Opus 4.6 in Claude Code in February, we set the de­fault rea­son­ing ef­fort to high.

Soon af­ter, we re­ceived user feed­back that Claude Opus 4.6 in high ef­fort mode would oc­ca­sion­ally think for too long, caus­ing the UI to ap­pear frozen and lead­ing to dis­pro­por­tion­ate la­tency and to­ken us­age for those users.

In gen­eral, the longer the model thinks, the bet­ter the out­put. Effort lev­els are how Claude Code lets users set that trade­off—more think­ing ver­sus lower la­tency and fewer us­age limit hits. As we cal­i­brate ef­fort lev­els for our mod­els, we take this trade­off into ac­count in or­der to pick points along the test-time-com­pute curve that give peo­ple the best range of op­tions. In the prod­uct layer, we then choose which point along this curve we set as our de­fault, and that is the value we send to the Messages API as the ef­fort pa­ra­me­ter; we then make the other op­tions avail­able via /effort.

In our in­ter­nal evals and test­ing, medium ef­fort achieved slightly lower in­tel­li­gence with sig­nif­i­cantly less la­tency for the ma­jor­ity of tasks. It also did­n’t suf­fer from the same is­sues with oc­ca­sional very long tail la­ten­cies for think­ing, and it helped max­i­mize users’ us­age lim­its. As a re­sult, we rolled out a change mak­ing medium the de­fault ef­fort, and ex­plained the ra­tio­nale via in-prod­uct di­a­log.

Soon af­ter rolling out, users be­gan re­port­ing that Claude Code felt less in­tel­li­gent. We shipped a num­ber of de­sign it­er­a­tions to make the cur­rent ef­fort set­ting clearer in or­der to alert peo­ple they could change the de­fault (notices on startup, an in­line ef­fort se­lec­tor, and bring­ing back ul­tra­think), but most users re­tained the medium ef­fort de­fault.

After hear­ing feed­back from more cus­tomers, we re­versed this de­ci­sion on April 7. All users now de­fault to xhigh ef­fort for Opus 4.7, and high ef­fort for all other mod­els.

A caching op­ti­miza­tion that dropped prior rea­son­ing

When Claude rea­sons through a task, that rea­son­ing is nor­mally kept in the con­ver­sa­tion his­tory so that on every sub­se­quent turn, Claude can see why it made the ed­its and tool calls it did.

On March 26, we shipped what was meant to be an ef­fi­ciency im­prove­ment to this fea­ture. We use prompt caching to make back-to-back API calls cheaper and faster for users. Claude writes the in­put to­kens to the cache when it makes an API re­quest, then af­ter a pe­riod of in­ac­tiv­ity the prompt is evicted from cache, mak­ing room for other prompts. Cache uti­liza­tion is some­thing we man­age care­fully (more on our ap­proach).

The de­sign should have been sim­ple: if a ses­sion has been idle for more than an hour, we could re­duce users’ cost of re­sum­ing that ses­sion by clear­ing old think­ing sec­tions. Since the re­quest would be a cache miss any­way, we could prune un­nec­es­sary mes­sages from the re­quest to re­duce the num­ber of un­cached to­kens sent to the API. We’d then re­sume send­ing full rea­son­ing his­tory. To do this we used the clear_­think­ing_20251015 API header along with keep:1.

The im­ple­men­ta­tion had a bug. Instead of clear­ing think­ing his­tory once, it cleared it on every turn for the rest of the ses­sion. After a ses­sion crossed the idle thresh­old once, each re­quest for the rest of that process told the API to keep only the most re­cent block of rea­son­ing and dis­card every­thing be­fore it. This com­pounded: if you sent a fol­low-up mes­sage while Claude was in the mid­dle of a tool use, that started a new turn un­der the bro­ken flag, so even the rea­son­ing from the cur­rent turn was dropped. Claude would con­tinue ex­e­cut­ing, but in­creas­ingly with­out mem­ory of why it had cho­sen to do what it was do­ing. This sur­faced as the for­get­ful­ness, rep­e­ti­tion, and odd tool choices peo­ple re­ported.

Because this would con­tin­u­ously drop think­ing blocks from sub­se­quent re­quests, those re­quests also re­sulted in cache misses. We be­lieve this is what drove the sep­a­rate re­ports of us­age lim­its drain­ing faster than ex­pected.

Two un­re­lated ex­per­i­ments made it chal­leng­ing for us to re­pro­duce the is­sue at first: an in­ter­nal-only server-side ex­per­i­ment re­lated to mes­sage queu­ing; and an or­thog­o­nal change in how we dis­play think­ing sup­pressed this bug in most CLI ses­sions, so we did­n’t catch it even when test­ing ex­ter­nal builds.

This bug was at the in­ter­sec­tion of Claude Code’s con­text man­age­ment, the Anthropic API, and ex­tended think­ing. The changes it in­tro­duced made it past mul­ti­ple hu­man and au­to­mated code re­views, as well as unit tests, end-to-end tests, au­to­mated ver­i­fi­ca­tion, and dog­food­ing. Combined with this only hap­pen­ing in a cor­ner case (stale ses­sions) and the dif­fi­culty of re­pro­duc­ing the is­sue, it took us over a week to dis­cover and con­firm the root cause.

As part of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we back-tested Code Review against the of­fend­ing pull re­quests us­ing Opus 4.7. When pro­vided the code repos­i­to­ries nec­es­sary to gather com­plete con­text, Opus 4.7 found the bug, while Opus 4.6 did­n’t. To pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing again, we are now land­ing sup­port for ad­di­tional repos­i­to­ries as con­text for code re­views.

We fixed this bug on April 10 in v2.1.101.

A sys­tem prompt change to re­duce ver­bosity

Our lat­est model, Claude Opus 4.7, has a no­table be­hav­ioral quirk rel­a­tive to its pre­de­ces­sor: as we wrote about at launch, it tends to be quite ver­bose. This makes it smarter on hard prob­lems, but it also pro­duces more out­put to­kens.

A few weeks be­fore we re­leased Opus 4.7, we started tun­ing Claude Code in prepa­ra­tion. Each model be­haves slightly dif­fer­ently, and we spend time be­fore each re­lease op­ti­miz­ing the har­ness and prod­uct for it.

We have a num­ber of tools to re­duce ver­bosity: model train­ing, prompt­ing, and im­prov­ing think­ing UX in the prod­uct. Ultimately we used all of these, but one ad­di­tion to the sys­tem prompt caused an out­sized ef­fect on in­tel­li­gence in Claude Code:

“Length lim­its: keep text be­tween tool calls to ≤25 words. Keep fi­nal re­sponses to ≤100 words un­less the task re­quires more de­tail.”

After mul­ti­ple weeks of in­ter­nal test­ing and no re­gres­sions in the set of eval­u­a­tions we ran, we felt con­fi­dent about the change and shipped it along­side Opus 4.7 on April 16.

As part of this in­ves­ti­ga­tion, we ran more ab­la­tions (removing lines from the sys­tem prompt to un­der­stand the im­pact of each line) us­ing a broader set of eval­u­a­tions. One of these eval­u­a­tions showed a 3% drop for both Opus 4.6 and 4.7. We im­me­di­ately re­verted the prompt as part of the April 20 re­lease.

Going for­ward

We are go­ing to do sev­eral things dif­fer­ently to avoid these is­sues: we’ll en­sure that a larger share of in­ter­nal staff use the ex­act pub­lic build of Claude Code (as op­posed to the ver­sion we use to test new fea­tures); and we’ll make im­prove­ments to our Code Review tool that we use in­ter­nally, and ship this im­proved ver­sion to cus­tomers.

We’re also adding tighter con­trols on sys­tem prompt changes. We will run a broad suite of per-model evals for every sys­tem prompt change to Claude Code, con­tin­u­ing ab­la­tions to un­der­stand the im­pact of each line, and we have built new tool­ing to make prompt changes eas­ier to re­view and au­dit. We’ve ad­di­tion­ally added guid­ance to our CLAUDE.md to en­sure model-spe­cific changes are gated to the spe­cific model they’re tar­get­ing. For any change that could trade off against in­tel­li­gence, we’ll add soak pe­ri­ods, a broader eval suite, and grad­ual roll­outs so we catch is­sues ear­lier.

We re­cently cre­ated @ClaudeDevs on X to give us the room to ex­plain prod­uct de­ci­sions and the rea­son­ing be­hind them in depth. We’ll share the same up­dates in cen­tral­ized threads on GitHub.

Finally, we’d like to thank our users: the peo­ple who used the /feedback com­mand to share their is­sues with us (or who posted spe­cific, re­pro­ducible ex­am­ples on­line) are the ones who ul­ti­mately al­lowed us to iden­tify and fix these prob­lems. Today we are re­set­ting us­age lim­its for all sub­scribers.

We’re im­mensely grate­ful for your feed­back and for your pa­tience.

In Brief

Posted:

11:08 AM PDT · April 23, 2026

Meta is plan­ning to cut 10% of its work­force, amount­ing to 8,000 em­ploy­ees, ac­cord­ing to a re­port from Bloomberg. Meta also will not hire for 6,000 roles that are cur­rently open.

According to an in­ter­nal memo sent to em­ploy­ees Thursday and viewed by Bloomberg, Meta told staff that the cuts will be­gin on May 20. Reuters had ear­lier re­ported on Meta’s plans for sweep­ing lay­offs.

TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for com­ment.

“We’re do­ing this as part of our con­tin­ued ef­fort to run the com­pany more ef­fi­ciently and to al­low us to off­set the other in­vest­ments we’re mak­ing,” chief peo­ple of­fice Janelle Gale told em­ploy­ees, ac­cord­ing to the memo. “This is not an easy trade­off and it will mean let­ting go of peo­ple who have made mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tions to Meta dur­ing their time here.”

Meta spent tens of bil­lions on its meta­verse ef­forts, which largely failed. The com­pany has also had to make ma­jor in­vest­ments in its AI ef­forts in or­der to keep up with com­peti­tors in the space — ear­lier this month, it de­buted a com­pletely over­hauled AI prod­uct called Muse Spark.

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“The United States was a rea­son­ably happy coun­try for a long time,” the University of Chicago econ­o­mist Sam Peltzman wrote in a 2026 pa­per. “It is not happy now.”

Crunching data from the General Social Survey, Peltzman doc­u­mented “a sud­den, sharp and his­tor­i­cally un­prece­dented de­cline in self-re­ported hap­pi­ness in the US pop­u­la­tion” af­ter COVID that “mainly per­sists” through 2024. He called it a “regime change” in na­tional sen­ti­ment. After 50 years of mostly steady lev­els of self-re­ported well-be­ing, American hap­pi­ness plunged. And it’s hardly bounced back at all.

Peltzman’s analy­sis is not a lonely voice; there is a ver­i­ta­ble cho­rus of gloomy sen­ti­ment. This week, the Federal Reserve’s mea­sure of US worker sat­is­fac­tion fell to its low­est level since the sur­vey be­gan in 2014. One week prior, con­sumer sen­ti­ment had fallen to the low­est level ever recorded in the 70-year his­tory of the University of Michigan eco­nomic sur­vey. Once again, the in­dex plunged around 2020 and, like a hiker on the far side of a moun­tain, con­tin­ues down step by step. Americans are telling poll­sters that they are more de­pressed about this econ­omy than they were dur­ing the depths of the Great Recession or the painful stagfla­tion­ary years of the 1970s.

Finally, the U.S. has also fallen to its low­est rank­ing ever in the World Happiness Report, largely due to the as­ton­ish­ingly swift de­cline in well-be­ing among young peo­ple in that in­ter­na­tional sur­vey.

Matt Clancy@mattsclancy

Circa 2024/2025, American self-re­ported well-be­ing re­mains near all-time lows in both the Gallup World Happiness data and the (much longer run­ning) GSS.

1:02 PM · Apr 10, 2026 · 11.6K Views

2 Replies · 5 Reposts · 36 Likes

If you are look­ing for a sym­pa­thetic ear to ex­plain this phe­nom­e­non, cer­tainly do not seek coun­sel from your lo­cal econ­o­mist. The American blues seem aw­fully cu­ri­ous to those who view the world through the key­hole of em­ploy­ment or in­come sta­tis­tics. The un­em­ploy­ment rate has been be­low 5 per­cent for prac­ti­cally the en­tire decade, which is ba­si­cally as good as you can ask for. For this en­tire decade, the US econ­omy has sig­nif­i­cantly out­grown the Eurozone and other rich coun­tries, such as Japan and the UK. Americans are rich and get­ting richer, by most con­ven­tional mea­sures. More Americans are break­ing into the up­per mid­dle class, and work­ers at the bot­tom of the in­come dis­tri­b­u­tion have seen their wages grow faster than those at the top in the last few years.

So, those who priv­i­lege eco­nomic sta­tis­tics over self-re­ports might be tempted to sum­ma­rize the sit­u­a­tion this way: America’s re­silient econ­omy is a fact, while Americans’ sad-sack sur­vey re­sults are mere ir­ra­tional feel­ings. There is some­thing to this; the gap be­tween so-called “hard data” (e.g., the un­em­ploy­ment rate) and “soft data” (e.g., a sur­vey) is cer­tainly wide and widen­ing. But a feel­ing is an im­por­tant kind of fact. Feelings don’t just shape con­sumer be­hav­ior. They shape po­lit­i­cal at­ti­tudes; and at­ti­tudes in­flu­ence vot­ing; and vot­ing de­ter­mines poli­cies; and poli­cies shape the econ­omy. To un­der­stand the fu­ture of the US econ­omy and the United States writ large, one can­not af­ford a haughty in­dif­fer­ence to­ward sen­ti­ment.

And on the sen­ti­ment front, what we’ve got are four sur­vey re­sults—four facts, you might even say, of American lugubri­ous­ness—all of which point to one un­mis­tak­able con­clu­soin. This decade has been the very op­po­site of “roaring.” We are mired in­stead in the Tragic Twenties.

One of the more re­mark­able dis­cov­er­ies in Peltzman’s pa­per is that the de­cline in self-re­ported well-be­ing since 2020 has not been con­cen­trated among young peo­ple, poor peo­ple, or un­mar­ried peo­ple—three of the groups typ­i­cally af­flicted by higher lev­els of anx­i­ety and sad­ness. Instead, the de­cline in hap­pi­ness has been an across-the-board 10- to 15-point dec­i­ma­tion ex­pe­ri­enced by prac­ti­cally every de­mo­graphic. (In the graphs be­low, BLUE refers to hap­pi­ness lev­els be­fore 2020; PINK is hap­pi­ness lev­els post-2020; and BLACK is the de­cline, which is re­mark­ably uni­form across groups.)

Something sig­nif­i­cant has blud­geoned Americans’ well-be­ing in the last six years with­out dis­crim­i­nat­ing much by age, ide­ol­ogy, ed­u­ca­tion, or gen­der. What is it?

The cul­prit has to fit the crime. Most im­por­tantly, it has to fit the tim­ing of the crime. What we’re look­ing for is some­thing that hap­pened around 2020 (uh, seems ob­vi­ous) and then did­n’t re­cover (ah, that’s the hard part). This tim­ing rules out sev­eral oth­er­wise plau­si­ble sus­pects.

It’s prob­a­bly not about cul­tural shifts, such as the de­cline of re­li­gion. Cultural con­ser­v­a­tives might try to ex­plain the Tragic Twenties by cit­ing the rise of sec­u­lar in­di­vid­u­al­ism among American lib­er­als and point­ing to the fact that re­li­gion seems to be a tonic for un­hap­pi­ness. But the rise of re­li­gious non-af­fil­i­a­tion in America has been a steady 30-year trend, whereas this falloff in well-be­ing started in 2020, when sec­u­lar­ism reached its re­cent peak. So, that ex­pla­na­tion won’t do.

It’s prob­a­bly not about cul­tural shifts, such as the de­cline of re­li­gion. Cultural con­ser­v­a­tives might try to ex­plain the Tragic Twenties by cit­ing the rise of sec­u­lar in­di­vid­u­al­ism among American lib­er­als and point­ing to the fact that re­li­gion seems to be a tonic for un­hap­pi­ness. But the rise of re­li­gious non-af­fil­i­a­tion in America has been a steady 30-year trend, whereas this falloff in well-be­ing started in 2020, when sec­u­lar­ism reached its re­cent peak. So, that ex­pla­na­tion won’t do.

It’s prob­a­bly not about old-fash­ioned wage in­equal­ity. Someone on the left might be in­clined to ar­gue that American mis­ery is the rea­son­able and au­to­matic so­ci­etal re­ac­tion to se­vere class in­equal­ity. But low-in­come wage growth has been un­usu­ally strong since the pan­demic, as the econ­o­mist Arin Dube has taken pains to point out. Median house­hold in­comes are higher now than they were 10 years ago. What’s more, Peltzman’s analy­sis finds that some of the largest de­clines in hap­pi­ness seem con­cen­trated among well-to-do de­mo­graph­ics, like older peo­ple, white peo­ple, and col­lege grad­u­ates. So, here’s an­other sus­pect that does­n’t fit the crime.

It’s prob­a­bly not about old-fash­ioned wage in­equal­ity. Someone on the left might be in­clined to ar­gue that American mis­ery is the rea­son­able and au­to­matic so­ci­etal re­ac­tion to se­vere class in­equal­ity. But low-in­come wage growth has been un­usu­ally strong since the pan­demic, as the econ­o­mist Arin Dube has taken pains to point out. Median house­hold in­comes are higher now than they were 10 years ago. What’s more, Peltzman’s analy­sis finds that some of the largest de­clines in hap­pi­ness seem con­cen­trated among well-to-do de­mo­graph­ics, like older peo­ple, white peo­ple, and col­lege grad­u­ates. So, here’s an­other sus­pect that does­n’t fit the crime.

It’s prob­a­bly not just about phones and so­cial me­dia. When the sub­ject is American anx­i­ety and un­hap­pi­ness, the most ob­vi­ous sus­pect is smart­phones, so­cial me­dia, and the surg­ing neg­a­tiv­ity of the American news cy­cle. As I ex­plained in a long es­say last month, I am quite per­suaded by the ar­gu­ment that phones and so­cial me­dia are as­so­ci­ated with—and, prob­a­bly, ac­tively caus­ing—a de­cline in well-be­ing among young peo­ple in the U.S. But the ris­ing mis­ery of young peo­ple—of­ten rightly as­so­ci­ated with ris­ing phone and so­cial me­dia use—has been go­ing on for about 15 years. The more sud­den col­lapse in gen­eral well­ness that we see in the GSS and University of Michigan data points to an emo­tional break that hap­pened around 2020. So, even if phones aren’t blame­less here (I’ll re­turn to them in a mo­ment), they don’t make sense as the pri­mary cul­prit.

It’s prob­a­bly not just about phones and so­cial me­dia. When the sub­ject is American anx­i­ety and un­hap­pi­ness, the most ob­vi­ous sus­pect is smart­phones, so­cial me­dia, and the surg­ing neg­a­tiv­ity of the American news cy­cle. As I ex­plained in a long es­say last month, I am quite per­suaded by the ar­gu­ment that phones and so­cial me­dia are as­so­ci­ated with—and, prob­a­bly, ac­tively caus­ing—a de­cline in well-be­ing among young peo­ple in the U.S. But the ris­ing mis­ery of young peo­ple—of­ten rightly as­so­ci­ated with ris­ing phone and so­cial me­dia use—has been go­ing on for about 15 years. The more sud­den col­lapse in gen­eral well­ness that we see in the GSS and University of Michigan data points to an emo­tional break that hap­pened around 2020. So, even if phones aren’t blame­less here (I’ll re­turn to them in a mo­ment), they don’t make sense as the pri­mary cul­prit.

If nei­ther cul­tural deca­dence, nor ma­te­r­ial in­equal­ity, nor phones and so­cial me­dia seem to fit the shape of this par­tic­u­lar phe­nom­e­non, we have to keep look­ing for what broke our brains in the 2020s. The sim­plest ex­pla­na­tion I can of­fer is this: As a cul­tural-po­lit­i­cal force, the 2020 pan­demic never ended.

One can­not even pre­tend to ex­plain the hap­pi­ness crash of 2020 with­out start­ing with the cri­sis that ar­rived in 2020 and never quite de­parted. The COVID pan­demic un­leashed more than a coro­n­avirus upon the planet. The bi­o­log­i­cal an­tag­o­nist of the dis­ease gave way to a cav­al­cade of eco­nomic dis­as­ters, from sup­ply chain dis­rup­tions, to global in­fla­tion, to surg­ing in­ter­est rates. We are still are liv­ing in the midst of an af­ter­shock.

While the of­fi­cial rate of an­nual in­fla­tion has gone up, then down, and then up, again, the typ­i­cal fam­ily does not ex­pe­ri­ence price changes as a 12-month av­er­age with monthly up­dates. What they feel at the gro­cery store, or the restau­rant, or the on­line check­out page, is some­thing more like holy shit, this cost what?! And that holy shit mo­ment is best un­der­stood as the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of years of above-av­er­age in­fla­tion.

Think of it this way: Consumer prices, which had in­creased by 25 per­cent be­tween the sum­mer of 2007 and the sum­mer of 2020, surged by the same amount be­tween the sum­mers of 2020 and 2025. In hous­ing, the 50 per­cent in­crease in the Case-Shiller US na­tional home price in­dex be­tween the sum­mers of 2020 and 2025 was equal to the 50 per­cent in­crease in home prices be­tween 2004 and 2020. In both cases, it is fair to say that Americans in the 21st cen­tury have ex­pe­ri­enced roughly triple the typ­i­cal rate of in­fla­tion in the 2020s com­pared to what they’d grown ac­cus­tomed to. Everything that peo­ple buy feels like it is con­stantly slip­ping out of the zone of af­ford­abil­ity, and that is ab­solutely mad­den­ing to many peo­ple, no mat­ter what the eco­nomic sta­tis­tics sug­gest they should feel.

The eco­nom­ics writer Matt Darling has traced the re­la­tion­ship be­tween ac­tual con­sumer sen­ti­ment and “predicted” sen­ti­ment, based on un­em­ploy­ment, in­fla­tion, and in­ter­est rates. Around 2020, the re­la­tion­ship broke down and con­sumer sen­ti­ment nose-dived into what Kyla Scanlon fa­mously dubbed a “vibecession.” In the graph be­low, the plung­ing dark pur­ple line shows ac­tual con­sumer sen­ti­ment while the light dot­ted line shows were con­sumer sen­ti­ment “should” be.

It is tempt­ing to think: Well, this just shows how ter­ri­ble in­fla­tion is for the poor­est Americans. But the most in­ter­est­ing and con­found­ing piece of Darling’s analy­sis is that it’s ac­tu­ally the rich­est third of house­holds whose con­sumer sen­ti­ment has plunged most sig­nif­i­cantly rel­a­tive to where we would ex­pect it to be. Darling’s ex­pla­na­tion is clever but de­press­ing: Full em­ploy­ment, es­pe­cially in an era of el­e­vated in­fla­tion, has in­creased the cost of every­thing that in­volves other peo­ple, and it’s cre­ated a na­tion of grumps. Here’s Darling:

I think part of what hap­pened is that many mid­dle- and up­per-in­come house­holds were used to be­ing able to af­ford low-wage la­bor on de­mand - for child­care, for food ser­vice, for home health care. Middle- and up­per-in­come house­holds found this frus­trat­ing and as­sumed it was part of the broad story through­out the econ­omy; not re­al­iz­ing that much of this frus­tra­tion was dri­ven by low-wage work­ers fi­nally earn­ing a lit­tle more bar­gain­ing power.

I think part of what hap­pened is that many mid­dle- and up­per-in­come house­holds were used to be­ing able to af­ford low-wage la­bor on de­mand - for child­care, for food ser­vice, for home health care. Middle- and up­per-in­come house­holds found this frus­trat­ing and as­sumed it was part of the broad story through­out the econ­omy; not re­al­iz­ing that much of this frus­tra­tion was dri­ven by low-wage work­ers fi­nally earn­ing a lit­tle more bar­gain­ing power.

Putting it all to­gether: In the last 40 years, Americans have come to ex­pect and prize af­ford­abil­ity with­out even hav­ing to think about it. But in the last five years, prices for all sorts of things, in­clud­ing hous­ing, have in­creased about three times faster than the rate Americans are used to; mean­while, full em­ploy­ment has put up­ward pres­sure on the cost of ser­vices. The US pub­lic has re­sponded by not only scream­ing at poll­sters about their mis­ery but also by rush­ing to the polls to vote out every in­cum­bent who failed to do some­thing about the “affordability” cri­sis of the 2020s. And Americans are not alone: The year 2024 was a blood­bath for in­cum­bent par­ties around the world, as fury about high prices went as global as the pan­demic it­self.

Which raises a good ques­tion: If it’s been a Tragic Twenties for the United States, what about the rest of the world?

According to the lat­est World Happiness Report, well-be­ing has ac­tu­ally in­creased in the last few years in many coun­tries, in­clud­ing China, India, and Vietnam. But well-be­ing has fallen in much of the west, par­tic­u­larly in English-speaking na­tions, such as the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.1 As John Helliwell, an eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor at the University of British Columbia and a co-au­thor of the World Happiness Report, told me: “If you’re look­ing for some­thing that’s spe­cial about the coun­tries where youth un­hap­pi­ness is ris­ing, they’re mostly Western de­vel­oped coun­tries, and for the most part, they are coun­tries that speak English.”

Change in Happiness Score: 2012 – 2025

There are sev­eral rea­sons why Anglophone coun­tries might have larger de­clines in well-be­ing in the last decade. Led by the U.S., these coun­tries share sev­eral or all of the fol­low­ing fea­tures: (1) a cul­ture of in­di­vid­u­al­ism that of­ten cor­re­lates with less time spent around other peo­ple; (2) a high de­gree of di­ag­nos­tic in­fla­tion, mean­ing ex­panded psy­chi­atric guide­lines for anx­i­ety, ADHD, and other men­tal health dis­or­ders, which me­chan­i­cally in­creases di­ag­nosed anx­i­ety and raises aware­ness about neg­a­tive men­tal health; and (3) high lev­els of neg­a­tiv­ity in the news ecosys­tem and on so­cial me­dia.

The graph above shows the de­cline in hap­pi­ness among Anglophone and other rich coun­tries since 2012. But what hap­pens when you nar­row the time pe­riod to the sub­ject of this es­say—the change in hap­pi­ness af­ter in the 2020s? You get this:

Now that is in­ter­est­ing. In Portugal, Italy, and Spain, hap­pi­ness in­creased in the 2020s. What do these coun­tries have in com­mon? They had some of the low­est av­er­age in­fla­tion rates through­out the 2020s in the west, while Germany and the UK had some of the worst in­fla­tion in cen­tral and west­ern Europe.

I think this in­ter­lude strength­ens two ar­gu­ments: first, that there is some­thing uniquely prob­lem­atic about men­tal health in the Anglosphere; and sec­ond, that higher rates of in­fla­tion are a ma­jor con­trib­u­tor to the Tragic Twenties phe­nom­e­non, both in the U.S. and through­out the west.

The word pan­demic comes from the Greek pan, mean­ing all, and demos, mean­ing peo­ple. But while the et­y­mol­ogy hints at whole­ness, the ef­fect of pan­demics has his­tor­i­cally been to break apart so­cial trust. In one re­cent analy­sis of the Spanish Flu, re­searchers found that the dis­ease had “permanent con­se­quences on in­di­vid­ual be­hav­ior in terms of lower so­cial trust.” So, it is per­haps not en­tirely sur­pris­ing that, in his pa­per, the econ­o­mist Peltzman found that con­fi­dence has fallen through­out the 2020s for just about every in­sti­tu­tion, in­clud­ing the fed­eral gov­ern­ment, the mil­i­tary, ma­jor com­pa­nies, ed­u­ca­tion, and or­ga­nized re­li­gion. Other stud­ies have found that trust has plum­meted for the CDC, higher ed­u­ca­tion, sci­ence, and med­i­cine.

It’s not just that Americans have lost trust in au­gust, far­away in­sti­tu­tions. Their faith in one an­other has suf­fered even more dra­matic de­clines. For decades, the General Social Survey has asked Americans the same ba­sic ques­tion: “Do you think most peo­ple would try to take ad­van­tage of you if they got a chance, or would they try to be fair?” In the 1970s and 1980s, Americans over­whelm­ingly agreed that other peo­ple are more or less trust­wor­thy. That con­fi­dence in strangers has plum­meted since 2020, ac­cord­ing to Peltzman. The share of re­spon­dents who say other peo­ple are “fair” has de­clined by even more than over­all hap­pi­ness.

Just as Americans’ trust in in­sti­tu­tions and strangers has de­clined, at least one mea­sure of ec­sta­tic in­di­vid­u­al­ism has as­cended in its place. Americans now spend an un­prece­dented amount of time by them­selves, along with an ab­nor­mal amount of time in­side our homes. This means that their en­gage­ment with other peo­ple is dis­pro­por­tion­ately me­di­ated, not by real-life ex­pe­ri­ences in the out­side world, but rather by al­go­rith­mic me­dia on their screens. As the NYU psy­chol­o­gist Jay Van Bavel has pointed out, on­line con­ver­sa­tions prize and re­ward neg­a­tiv­ity and out-group an­i­mos­ity, which con­vert peo­ple who might oth­er­wise en­joy (or tol­er­ate) one an­oth­er’s pres­ence in a bar or of­fice into an­tag­o­nists.

It’s not that I think the de­cline of in­sti­tu­tional trust and the rise of soli­tary in­di­vid­u­al­ism ought to pro­duce un­hap­pi­ness for all who ex­pe­ri­ence it. But trust, com­pan­ion­ship, and com­mu­nity are shock ab­sorbers in times of per­sonal and na­tional cri­sis. And the fi­nal thing that must be said about the 2020s is that it re­ally has been one damn cri­sis af­ter an­other.

In his 2023 col­umn “The Economy Is Great. Why Are Americans in Such a Rotten Mood?” the Wall Street Journal colum­nist Greg Ip wrote that Americans’ eco­nomic pes­simism was akin to the bi­o­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non of “referred pain.” He wrote:

Just as one part of your body can hurt be­cause of in­jury to an­other, pes­simism about the econ­omy may re­flect dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the coun­try as a whole. Lately, there has been a lot to be dis­sat­is­fied about: in­ten­si­fy­ing po­lit­i­cal and cul­tural con­flict and in­tol­er­ance, the pan­demic, the bor­der, mass shoot­ings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.

Just as one part of your body can hurt be­cause of in­jury to an­other, pes­simism about the econ­omy may re­flect dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the coun­try as a whole. Lately, there has been a lot to be dis­sat­is­fied about: in­ten­si­fy­ing po­lit­i­cal and cul­tural con­flict and in­tol­er­ance, the pan­demic, the bor­der, mass shoot­ings, crime, war in Ukraine and now the war in the Middle East.

Indeed, the decade has pretty much been a dump­ster fire, has­n’t it? A once-in-a-cen­tury pan­demic yielded to a once-in-a-gen­er­a­tion in­fla­tion cri­sis. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and the Persian Gulf fol­lowed one an­other in a steady mar­tial drum­beat. Existential fears of cli­mate change gave way to ex­is­ten­tial fears of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence. And all of this took place dur­ing a pe­riod when Donald Trump hov­ered over the po­lit­i­cal realm like some kind of un­earthly specter—rep­re­sent­ing the im­mi­nence of fas­cism to roughly half the coun­try while, to the other half or so, sig­ni­fy­ing a sec­u­lar sav­ior come to save tra­di­tional val­ues from the de­monic scourge of left­ism. That is all quite a lot.

In this decade of per­ma­cri­sis, the news has be­come ex­cep­tion­ally dire, and we have data to show just how much. A 2024 Brookings analy­sis of news sen­ti­ment found that “news tone has been more neg­a­tive than the fun­da­men­tals would pre­dict dur­ing 2018 to 2020 and even more neg­a­tive than pre­dicted in 2021 to 2023.” Today’s news is more sur­pris­ingly neg­a­tive than at any pe­riod of news on record.

The his­toric pes­simism of the news cy­cle is both a re­flec­tion of the per­ma­cri­sis decade and a dri­ver of the im­pres­sion that we are con­stantly on the verge of cri­sis. As a global health emer­gency, the COVID pan­demic may have ended, but the state of cri­sis that Americans feel in their day-to-day lives when they make con­tact with the news has not gone away. The in­fec­tion rate went down, but the feel­ing that the world is con­stantly puls­ing with emer­gency did­n’t go any­where.

And so, this is as close as I can get to a uni­fied the­ory of the Tragic Twenties. American sad­ness this decade has been forged by the fact of, and the feel­ing of, a per­ma­nent un­re­lent­ing eco­nomic cri­sis, am­pli­fied by a uniquely neg­a­tive news and me­dia en­vi­ron­ment, and ex­ac­er­bated by the rise of soli­tude and the de­clin­ing cen­tral­ity of trusted in­sti­tu­tions. Inflation has made to­day’s life harder to af­ford, while the am­bi­ent aware­ness of other peo­ple’s tri­umphs on so­cial me­dia had made to­mor­row’s suc­cess feel harder to achieve. The on­go­ing col­lapse of con­fi­dence in the es­tab­lish­ment has made Americans feel un­usu­ally adrift and dis­sat­is­fied with in­sti­tu­tions out­side of their con­trol, while the cho­sen self-iso­la­tion of mod­ern life has de­mol­ished com­mu­nal trust, as we in­creas­ingly ex­pe­ri­ence other peo­ple’s minds through the toxic sur­re­al­ity of our screens rather than through the em­bod­ied re­al­ity of strangers who are, for the most part, just as nice as we are.

1

Is there re­ally some­thing spe­cial about English-speaking that’s cor­re­lated with de­clines in well-be­ing in the last few years? Helliwell sug­gested a clever test of the the­ory: Look at Quebec, where more than 80 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion speaks French. In neigh­bor­ing Ontario, by con­trast, less than 4 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion speaks French. So, are the Quebecois some­what in­oc­u­lated from the epi­demic of Anglophone un­hap­pi­ness? Strange as it seems, the an­swer seems to be yes: “In Gallup data used for the World Happiness Report, life sat­is­fac­tion for peo­ple un­der 30 in Quebec fell half as much as it did for peo­ple in the rest of Canada, Helliwell told me. In a sep­a­rate analy­sis of Canada’s General Social Survey, which asks re­spon­dents about their pre­ferred lan­guage, re­searchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Alberta found that young peo­ple who speak French at home saw a smaller de­cline in hap­pi­ness than those who speak English at home.”

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In Brief

Posted:

12:34 PM PDT · April 22, 2026

The French gov­ern­ment agency that han­dles the is­su­ing and man­age­ment of cit­i­zens’ iden­tity doc­u­ments, in­clud­ing na­tional IDs, pass­ports, and im­mi­gra­tion doc­u­ments, con­firmed Wednesday that it ex­pe­ri­enced a data breach.

In an an­nounce­ment, the Agence Nationale des Titres Sécurisés (ANTS) said the data stolen in the breach could in­clude full names, dates and places of birth, mail­ing and email ad­dresses, and phone num­bers on an undis­closed num­ber of cit­i­zens. ANTS said the in­ves­ti­ga­tion to de­ter­mine how the breach hap­pened and its im­pact is on­go­ing, and peo­ple whose data was af­fected are be­ing no­ti­fied.

ANTS, which said it de­tected the at­tack on April 15, did not spec­ify how many peo­ple were af­fected by the breach. But some re­port­ing sug­gests mil­lions may have had some of their per­sonal in­for­ma­tion stolen.

According to Bleeping Computer, a hacker has ad­ver­tised the stolen data on a hack­ing fo­rum, claim­ing to have a data­base with 19 mil­lion records. The hack­er’s fo­rum post ref­er­enced the same kind of stolen in­for­ma­tion as men­tioned in ANTS’ an­nounce­ment and was pub­lished be­fore ANTS pub­licly dis­closed the breach on April 20.

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France Titres, the gov­ern­ment agency in France for is­su­ing and man­ag­ing ad­min­is­tra­tive doc­u­ments has dis­closed a data breach af­ter a threat ac­tor claimed the at­tack and steal­ing cit­i­zen data.

Also known as Agence na­tionale des titres sécurisés (ANTS), the ad­min­is­tra­tive body op­er­ates un­der the French Ministry of the Interior, serv­ing as the man­ag­ing au­thor­ity for of­fi­cial iden­tity and reg­is­tra­tion doc­u­ments in France. This in­cludes dri­ver’s li­censes, na­tional ID cards, pass­ports, and im­mi­gra­tion doc­u­ments.

According to an an­nounce­ment the agency pub­lished yes­ter­day, the at­tack oc­curred last week, and while the in­ves­ti­ga­tion is still on­go­ing, sev­eral data types for an undis­closed num­ber of in­di­vid­u­als may have been ex­posed.

“On Wednesday, April 15, 2026, the National Agency for Secure Documents (ANTS) de­tected a se­cu­rity in­ci­dent that may in­volve the dis­clo­sure of data from in­di­vid­ual and pro­fes­sional ac­counts on the ants.gouv.fr por­tal,” reads ANTS’s an­nounce­ment.

The types of data that may have been ex­posed are:

Login ID

Full name

Email ad­dress

Date of birth

Unique ac­count iden­ti­fier

Postal ad­dress (for some)

Place of birth (for some)

Phone num­ber (for some)

ANTS stated that it is cur­rently in the process of no­ti­fy­ing those iden­ti­fied as im­pacted.

The agency noted that the ex­posed in­for­ma­tion does not al­low unau­tho­rized ac­cess to its elec­tronic por­tals. However, the same data can be used in phish­ing and so­cial en­gi­neer­ing at­tacks.

“No ac­tion is re­quired from users. However, they are ad­vised to re­main highly vig­i­lant re­gard­ing any sus­pi­cious or un­usual mes­sages they may re­ceive (SMS, phone calls, emails, etc.) that ap­pear to come from ANTS,” the agency warned.

ANTS has no­ti­fied the data pro­tec­tion au­thor­ity (CNIL), the Paris Public Prosecutor, and has also in­volved the na­tional cy­ber­se­cu­rity agency (ANSSI) in the re­sponse ef­fort. The agency warned that the sale or dis­sem­i­na­tion of the data is il­le­gal.

19 mil­lion records claimed stolen

On April 16, a threat ac­tor us­ing the moniker ‘breach3d’ claimed the at­tack on hacker fo­rums claimed the at­tack on ANTS, al­leg­ing to be hold­ing up to 19 mil­lion records.

The threat ac­tor claims that the stolen data con­tains full names, con­tact de­tails, birth data, home ad­dresses, ac­count meta­data, and gen­der and civil sta­tus.

The data has been of­fered for sale for an undis­closed amount, so it has not been broadly leaked yet.

ANTS saus that user do not need to take any ac­tion but rec­om­mends ex­er­cis­ing “extreme cau­tion” about sus­pi­cious or un­usual com­mu­ni­ca­tion over SMS, voice, and emails ap­pear­ing to come from the agency.

BleepingComputer has con­tacted ANTS to ask about the threat ac­tor’s al­le­ga­tions, but we have not re­ceived a re­sponse as of pub­lish­ing.

Update 4/24 - ANTS pub­lished an up­date on the in­ci­dent where the agency con­firmed that 11.7 mil­lion ac­counts were im­pacted.

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