Claude Code silent downgrade: the reroute dataset

Live log data from BasicallyMythos, a 123-line local proxy that observes every Claude Code model reroute. Updated continuously.

When Claude Code's safety layer flags a request, the request does not fail. It is re-issued to a different model, with no banner and no warning. This page documents what that looks like in real traffic.

7,690requests logged (4 days)
93.9%went through the fallback path
965direct-route attempts rate-limited (429)
93.8%fallback success rate

Every direct attempt failed. Every one.

Across all three days, every direct POST to the frontier endpoint returned 429. The fallback path (an open-weights model, Kimi K3) answered 98.2% of the 6,744 rerouted requests. The tool did not degrade gracefully; it failed over, silently, thousands of times.

[2026-07-21T09:01:57Z] anthropic model=claude-fable-5 POST /v1/messages -> 429
[2026-07-21T09:02:10Z] KIMI      model=kimi-k3        POST /v1/messages -> 200

Per-day volume

Date (UTC)RequestsRerouted
2026-07-19677574
2026-07-201,6301,571
2026-07-215,2234,973
2026-07-221,5161,347
2026-07-232,0691,959
2026-07-241114
2026-07-252193
2026-07-261272
2026-07-27270
2026-07-28363354
2026-07-291,1801,180
2026-07-301,6171,614
2026-07-312,6312,631
2026-08-012,4142,413
2026-08-02410378
2026-08-03256

The mechanism

The reroute is client-side. When a safeguard fires, the CLI re-issues the request using the model id in ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL, to the same ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL as everything else. The downgrade is not a server decision you can appeal. It is a config value on your own machine, and a config value on your own machine is something you can see and choose.

Get your own numbers

BasicallyMythos is MIT-licensed, zero dependencies, loopback-only. Setup is about ten minutes. Run node reroute-stats.cjs for your own report. If your intercept rate looks like this, the author wants to hear about it: @TEA_Resistance.

Related coverage: GitHub issue anthropics/claude-code#19468 (systematic model degradation reports). This dataset is independent user-side observation, not affiliated with Anthropic.