WebFetch/WebSearch fail with "400 adaptive thinking is not supported on this model" under Sonnet medium

Status Open
Maintainer reply None cached
Activity 1 comment · opened Sep 19, 2026

Description

WebFetch and WebSearch consistently fail with the same API error, reproducible across multiple attempts and different URLs/queries:

API Error: 400 adaptive thinking is not supported on this model

Environment

  • Model: Sonnet, "medium" reasoning effort
  • Reproduced 5+ times across WebFetch and WebSearch, different URLs and queries, same error every time

What I ruled out

  • Not a network/connectivity issue — curl to the same URLs succeeds (200 OK) from the same machine/session
  • Not a specific-URL issue — reproduces across different domains and with plain search queries

Suspected cause

WebFetch's own tool description states it "processes fetched content using a small, fast model" — a separate internal API call for summarization. The error strongly suggests that internal call is passing an "adaptive thinking" parameter the underlying model/tier doesn't support, specific to the Sonnet-medium configuration.

Expected behavior

WebFetch/WebSearch should work normally under Sonnet medium, or fail with a clearer error if this reasoning-effort tier genuinely isn't supported for these tools.

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