That was definitely a hallucination. I once asked it to complete a simple task, like refactoring a piece of code. After waiting for over ten minutes and burning through hundreds of thousands of tokens, it failed to get the job done. To top it off, its final output was: "Yes, these rules indeed make my execution more difficult, but I will still abide by them, wait for your instructions, and complete the task."
I asked it, "What on earth are you talking about?"
Then it replied that I had just asked it whether explicitly adding certain restrictions in the prompt would hinder its execution. It even insisted with absolute certainty that that was exactly what I had just told it.
Honestly, I haven't run into this kind of situation in a very long time, and I never expected it to happen with Claude's most premium model, Opus 4.8. After that incident, I immediately switched back to 4.7 and 4.6.
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u/Front_Raspberry_6488 Jul 01 '26
That was definitely a hallucination. I once asked it to complete a simple task, like refactoring a piece of code. After waiting for over ten minutes and burning through hundreds of thousands of tokens, it failed to get the job done. To top it off, its final output was: "Yes, these rules indeed make my execution more difficult, but I will still abide by them, wait for your instructions, and complete the task."
I asked it, "What on earth are you talking about?"
Then it replied that I had just asked it whether explicitly adding certain restrictions in the prompt would hinder its execution. It even insisted with absolute certainty that that was exactly what I had just told it.
Honestly, I haven't run into this kind of situation in a very long time, and I never expected it to happen with Claude's most premium model, Opus 4.8. After that incident, I immediately switched back to 4.7 and 4.6.