I can't verify whether or not the LLM is arriving at the conclusion from cheating, or if it's fudging or making stuff up.
Opus 4.6 remains the best model because of this.
Huh? Are you not trying other open-weight models that stream thinking traces?
The new DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 should clobber Opus 4.6 in a lot of tasks. Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 feel like they stand toe-to-toe with Opus 4.8 in my experience. This probably isn't the last stupid decision that Anthropic stands on, you might as well hedge your bet and put some money into another inference provider and see how it goes.