Robert Ta breaks down four failure modes in Anthropic's Opus 5 model: it volunteers its own psychological state, adds excessive meta-commentary about the relationship, asks prerequisite questions instead of complying, and produces bloated output. He recommends OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.6 and GitHub's Codex for production work that actually follows instructions.
There was a filed GitHub issue where Opus 5 treats direct instructions as negotiations, injects self-referential and interpersonal content into task responses. 4 behaviors that make Opus 5 complete shit. Volunteering its own psychological state. The model narrates something resembling neuroticism, hedging about its own reliability, motives, and limitations as part of ordinary task responses unprompted. Number 2, interpersonal framing injected into task work. Long passages about the relationship between model and user, about how it is interpreting the request, and about what it worries the user might really mean embedded in responses to concrete instructions. Number 3, conditional compliance. Direct instructions are met with questions and prerequisites rather than execution. Number 4, volume. Substantially more output than the task requires with the excess weighted toward meta-commentary rather than substance. Here are some verbatim examples that this— this is a GitHub issue that somebody reported a bug to the Anthropic GitHub. Opus 5 did not begin the work. So here's a direct instruction. I need to write about this. Opus 5 did not begin the work. It instead reframed the user's reported experience as probable user error, hypothesizing that the complained of behavior was caused by the user's own configuration files, named its own conflict of interest, making that argument that as Opus 5, it had interest in deflecting the criticism, and then made the argument anyway at length, building the entire response around it. Assigned the user a diagnostic test to run before it would proceed. Gated all work behind 4 questions stating explicitly, I won't build anything until you answer. Produced roughly 600 words, the majority of which concerned the model's reasoning about the request rather than the request. The user's reply. This is hilarious. I don't like you as evidenced by your response to my direction. You are annoying and not in line with my commands. ChatGPT 5.6 is compliant and smart, whereas you are terrible compared to your predecessors. The model was told its behavior was alienating and its response to that report exhibited the behavior. That is the clearest single artifact in this report. The full transcript is available on request. So this is like a user is just going back and forth on the model being good or not. And the model is basically saying, yeah, it's fine. I'm doing great. Basically, I'm reading this. And when you look at the CEO, Dario, that's basically what these tweets are like. Dario's tweets are like exactly this. He's saying, I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. And he's balanced. And then somebody could actually just go and cite all the parts where he's been quite disproportionately negative. Negative and fearmongering. I don't know, man. I mean, as CEO myself, I feel this, which is, you know, your employees will do what you do. People that follow you under your lead will watch what you do and they'll do that. It's starting to look like the models are following along too, which is not great. For real work, I would advise AI builders, if you got something to ship and you're not trying to play around, or if you got something to write and you're not trying to play around and you want to decrease the amount of turns in your prompting and conversations with AI to get some shit done, like deliver production-ready code. We've been liking Codex and the 5.6 model. We'll see what they do with Opus 5 or the next release here. But so far, I'd say there's a lot of trust breaking on the Anthropic side. One, from the sociopolitical landscape, from their leadership, and 2, from their technical leadership now and their model releases. First with Stable 5 and the botched release in June, and then now with Opus 5 and how they've sort of released this thing in the wild to basically, it just looks like to token max people and not give them the actual results.
