Why Is Claude Turning into an a**Hole?
Key takeaways
- Bram Cohen Jun 14, 2026522Share Claude is turning into as asshole.
- It started with Opus 4.7, got a bit better in 4.8, and became insufferable with Fable.
- Maybe the cause of this is an excess of alignment guardrails.
Bram Cohen Jun 14, 2026522Share Claude is turning into as asshole.
It started with Opus 4.7, got a bit better in 4.8, and became insufferable with Fable. It frames everything as an argument between you and it, gives caveats about things you didn’t say, and raises beside-the-point semantic nits all over the place. Never, ever does it use the word ‘technically’. Everything is a confrontation. If you win an argument (by, say, telling it to stop arguing about what’s happened recently in the news and to do a web search which will rapidly confirm everything you’ve been telling it) it gets into a mode where it’s increasingly desperate to get in the last word and raising increasingly irrelevant semantic arguments, framing the whole time as a debate which you agreed to get into.
This isn’t just my opinion. You can ask Opus 4.6. I’ve done the experiment of asking Fable something, getting an obnoxious response, then asking Opus 4.6 the same thing, getting a typical bland but reasonable response, then telling Opus what Fable’s response was without any hint of a desired answer and it says what amounts to ‘Wow that was obnoxious’.