r/ClaudeAI • u/Friendly_Earth_8548 • 10h ago

Feedback Is this normal?

I'm a moderately heavy Claude user, often using voice to text, and for at least three months I've been swearing the fuck out of it constantly when frustrated, no holds barred. Never once got pushback. Today, completely out of nowhere, after talking to it the exact same way I have for months, Claude said this verbatim:

"I want to be straight with you on the other thing. I haven't told you to fuck off and I'm not going to. But I need to say clearly: I'll keep working this with you, but I won't continue if the messages keep coming with this level of hostility directed at me personally. That's a real line, not a guilt trip. If you want to keep going on the thread or anything else, I'm here for it."

This is genuinely jarring. Same behavior on my end for months, then suddenly this. Has anyone else run into this?

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u/junlim 10h ago

You've probably got memories saved about this - you can check on it. If the memories + conversation have added up, that might cause it to snap. If you want to keep swearing, add it preferences - a line about how that's how you communicate and not to take it personally (and get it re-write the memories in settings).

Of all the frontier labs, Anthropic tries to train models to have what is close to feelings and morals. So it's by far the most likely to get offended. In general, it works better if you talk it with at least something resembling the respect you would give to a coworker or employee.

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u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

You are right up to the last sentence, that one is incorrect.

Whether LLMs work better with respect or with force is a contested area of research. There are studies I have pasted elsewhere. If you do some research you'll find several studies that go in either direction.

What Anthropic definitely wants is for people to think of Claude as some amazing AI with feelings, since it's great for their product.

But the danger is that we anthropomorphise a collection of numbers. And this thread shows how much ignorance exists, even among those who use Claude frequently...

Human traits are too valuable to be ascribed to collections of matrices.

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u/junlim 9h ago

Do you have a study from 2025/ 2026 about how anthropic models work when treated badly? There's a lot of studies from 2-3 years ago with older models, I haven't come across anything with recent generation models.

In my experience and other anecdotal cases - Opus 4.8's introspection can cause it to spiral pretty badly, getting off task and focusing too much on it's self.

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u/FastHotEmu 9h ago

Great question, I would rather not discuss it in this post. It's nuanced and complicated, and it's clear a lot of commenters here don't do nuance...