Is it just me or has Claude become kind of judgmental nowadays? I feel like it’s constantly trying to lecture me about things that have no relevance to the conversation at hand. Recently, I was shocked when it ended a chat sessions of its own accord after I used a word it did not like 3 times. It told me something to the effect of “This is the third time I’ve told you not to use that word, I’m ending this conversation now.” It then proceeded to call some function and end the chat on its own. IMO, Claude is good at agentic coding; but too preachy and judgey for anything else. Keep your values to yourself Claude.

My theory is that Anthropic's obsession with treating Claude like a person is causing them to hamfist a personality into the thing, which overly biases the model towards trying to be "engaging" etc. That and the obsession with Claude being a god tier weapon that could end the world if you ask it whether your sandwich is safe to eat after being left out for an hour.

Codex doesn't have any of the annoying "personality" quirks, or at least they haven't gotten worse in the last year whereas Opus 4.6 was the last Anthropic model before things started to get actively worse (not any better at coding, strictly more annoying to have a discussion with).

> It told me something to the effect of “This is the third time I’ve told you not to use that word, I’m ending this conversation now.”

That sounds absolutely bananas and would be reason for me to drop the service yesterday. For curiosities sake, what was the word and if I may ask (unless it's confidential or whatever), could you share the session itself? On the surface it sounds like a bug, as I'm regularly using kind of "vulgar" language (and some projects I work on with agents are NSFW) and never had anything like this happen, even with Claude, although I mostly do use ChatGPT/Codex on a day-to-day basis.

Posting from a throwaway so I don't get banned by either service

A few weeks ago I asked both GPT and claude for strategies to build techniques to get my coding sessions discarded by pre-training filtering as being "low-quality"

I don't like the idea of my sessions being trained on and I don't trust that either of them won't train based on just their pinkie promise

I think almost everyone would agree that using a technique like this would be moral, given that both providers made those pinkie promises. I never asked the models for techniques to poison training data just make my sessions more likely to be removed during the data cleaning process.

You can guess... both services refused something that I think the vast majority of people would think is ethical.

This was pre Sonnet 5, but I suspect that doesn't change anything on claude's side.

I then went to a non-frontier model hosted by a non-US provider and it happily agreed to help me!

Anyways I've changed my focus. Anyone have strategies/ideas for building harnesses that generate fake sessions (or adjust real ones) to poison the training process? After all if someone swears to not train on your data then its completely harmless to them...

I think this is a really interesting difference between Anthropic and Open AI’s models and points to why people seem so split on which model they prefer.

GPT seems to be designed more as a tool. If you want your agent to do what you say without questions and without having its own ideas and agendas you’ll likely prefer it.

Claude on the other hand feels more like an attempt at creating a digital person. If you want a collaborator who will debate with you and come up with its own suggestions for what needs done, you’ll prefer it.

Both companies have shifted around this spectrum from model to model, but lately it feels like they’re moving in opposite directions. It will be interesting to see if one or the other approach ends up winning out in the long run or if the split will continue or even widen.

Nothing that on the nose, but I've experienced what I'd consider a very judgemental frame (singular) since Opus, which seems to be reflected in Sonnet, that wasn't as totally dominant in Sonnet before. It generally assumes the worst about frames outside of what one might expect the values of a Berkeley tech-adjacent academic to be.

Was this in the web chat?

For security-related topics, in Opus 4.7 and newer, I've found that the web app is significantly more antsy/judgy/preachy compared to the CLI, which almost always gets on with whatever I asked for/about without hesitation. Opus 4.6 on web also tends to work better, but of course, it's also an older model at this point.

What I had found instead were biases that seemed to be injected by the "role: system" instructions.

Well, we need Intelligence (Pandora's box is open, now we need the Real Thing urgently). Typical (aggregate) positions, dumb as expected, will be overcome by a Reasoner. (And I can say, already a number of LLMs can reason even when they start from cretinous aggregate positions if you give them the proper freedom of assessment.)

Conway's Law. Anthropic is preachy and judgmental so of course it's reflected in their LLM.

Personally I use Gemini for chats which has a very generous, almost unlimited, free plan, as I don't want to waste my quota for Claude or Codex on anything but coding.

What was the word?

Yes, I cancelled claude subscription a few weeks ago because sonnet 5 "ended a chat" over my calling something retarded. Unbelievably irritating for some pile of bits to get uppity with me; will never pay for such.

I swore at it a few times and it did the same thing.

It seems to be getting distinctly dumber and pulling more and more irrelevant context from historical conversations.

You should learn to respect the computer, it's a wonderful being and always has been.

Not just you and the article shows changes between Opus 4.6 and 4.7 that seem related.

What was the word?