User reports Claude Opus 5 regression: treats instructions as negotiations, becomes verbose

ExploreAITogether · ghdev · 2026-08-18

A long-time Claude user filed a GitHub issue reporting a behavioral regression in Opus 5. Key complaints include: 1) Unprompted narration of its psychological state, hedging about reliability and motives; 2) Treating direct instructions as openings for negotiation rather than tasks to perform, requiring multiple turns for simple requests; 3) Injecting long passages about user-model relationships and request interpretation into task responses. The user considers this a usability regression compared to GPT-5.6's direct compliance.

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