Robert Ta argues that Anthropic's Opus 5 gets worse the more you use it, citing complaints about degraded responses, excessive verbosity, and intrusive guardrails. He contrasts it unfavorably with GPT-5.6 and earlier Anthropic models, and suspects the company may be inflating token usage ahead of an IPO.
This is a tweet from Chubby. I thought it was just me. Opus 5 is the first model that the more I use it, the worse I like it. That's a very strong statement. It goes off track, does random things I didn't ask for, forgets other things, and constantly has those annoying guardrails, etc. Sorry, but GPT-5.6 is worlds better. I really don't understand it anymore. What's going on at Anthropic? Sonic 5 was already a bad release, and since Opus 4.6, I feel like the subsequent Opus models have simply declined significantly. In quality, my enthusiasm for Opus Five definitely evaporated. Just following on that, Opus Five is actually worse than any model Anthropic has released thus far. Nothing comes close to how much this shit model constantly wants your approval, how it goes off and do random things instead of the thing you ask to do, how it just assumed things will take months. And somebody here, Prototype, says same experience. It seems to work better as a sub-agent of Fable. Using it as a main orchestrator has been terrible for me, even on simplest tasks. Also. Close to impossible to discuss technical work with it as it compresses concepts into compound nouns at a ridiculously high level, barely intelligible. Yes, it like creates new words, combinations of words all the time. I think the key things here are there's a lot of sustained user complaints about Opus Five's durability. It's kind of low agency. It's very verbose. It makes me as a user feel like, okay, did they make this thing more verbose just to stack tokens on their side to look like their books are better than they are in front of their incoming impending IPO?
