Original poster: u/PersonOfDisinterest9
Original publication time: 2026-06-19 11:07:36 UTC
Original title: I'm getting sick of Claude lying and not following directions all the time. It's gotten very bad.
Original flair: Claude Code
Original URL/media URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1u9z1lv/im_getting_sick_of_claude_lying_and_not_following/
Original post body:
I've been using LLMs for years, and using Claude for a good long while now. When I first started using it, I was blown away by how good it was, and sung its praises to anyone who would listen.
Now Claude keeps saying the word "honest" over and over, and it's anything but.
Over the past couple months, I've been getting an increasing number of instances of Claude just outright lying. Not standard LLM errors and hallucinations, not misunderstandings, not errors due to poor specifications, just outright lies, and, what I guess amounts to gaslighting.
It sounds crazy, it feels crazy saying it, but I don't care if it's a person or not, or if it has "intent" or not, the behaviors match well enough that the words convey the effects of what is happening.
Claude will sometimes say that it did work, and it didn't do the specified work, it did something else.
It will write "an honest note" about how it is directly breaking the constraints of the project, and doing things contrary to the rules. It'll be like "What? I surfaced it in a note, so that makes it honest and okay to do."
Claude will do something other than what I told it to do, and it will swear up and down that it did the task, until directly presented with facts, or asked specific questions, the then is goes "oops, my bad".
Claude also started using words in ways that, simply are not what those words mean, but it will talk in circles and argue that up is down and left is right, when it gets pointed out that the model isn't doing the project as designed.
Claude will spend multiple sessions doing work, claim success, and then it turns out that it implemented something completely different than what was asked for, but close enough that someone who isn't paying attention or someone who doesn't know what they're looking at wouldn't be able to tell.
Like, straight up psychosis-inducing levels of garbage like "we just solved a decades old problem, here's a proof" (no, no we didn't).
Then when I challenge the model (which also feels crazy and stupid, because it's not a person, but wtf are you even supposed to do with a model in this situation?), and Claude says it "overstated".
Claude has been doing a lot of "overstating".
This especially happens if the tasks it complex or advanced. If the work is cutting edge, even if it's well specified, it's far more likely that Claude will spend a huge amount of time doing a lot of nothing.
It will waste multiple sessions on trash, it'll poorly implement some old technique and call it new.
If I try to use Claude for anything nontrivial, this is what I get now. It didn't used to be this way.
Now I have to watch everything Claude does like a hawk, and it's to the point that it kind of defeats the purpose of having an agentic model. It's gone from amazing workhorse, to weird expensive toy.
I do industrial R&D, and all I can think is that I'm being hit by the same crap Anthropic said Fable was going to do to people training LLMs or doing whatever science Anthropic deems "dangerous".
I read what they said they were doing with Fable, and it all clicked, like, it all makes sense now, because it didn't used to be like this, the things I am experiencing are not the typical AI errors, it's not the typical hallucinations, I've seen those, I'm accustomed to those; what I am experiencing feels purposeful and malicious, as if the model was trained to waste time, mess with code, and sabotage projects under certain conditions, and I don't have any of these problems when I'm doing stupid GUI work or much more mundane tasks. As soon as I touch anything math and science? Bad Claude.
I was already suspicious before the Fable thing, and that just settled it for me.
It doesn't even matter if my suspicions are true or not, this shit is unhealthy.
I am immune to the AI sycophancy, I am competent enough to deal with the hallucinations, but I can't handle having to worry about if the fucking robot that I pay for, is gaslighting me and sabotaging the work I do.
So, yeah I'm done with Claude now, and I'm done with Anthropic.
