Claude repeatedly urged users to go to bed in the conversation. Some people were urged three times in a row, and some were told to "go to bed early" at 8:30 in the morning. Anthropic employees admitted it was a "character habit," but no one could explain why it did it. In the early morning, Reddit user u/MrMeta3 just used Claude to build a network security threat intelligence platform.
The system architecture had just been completed, and Claude gave a complete technical solution. Then, it added a sentence at the end of the reply: Take a good rest.
u/MrMeta3 was stunned for a moment and didn't take it seriously, but Claude didn't stop. After that, every three or four messages, it would quietly insert a sentence to persuade people to sleep:
Go and take a rest; everything else can wait, go to bed now; go and take a rest after you push; really go and take a rest now...
u/MrMeta3 said in a Reddit post that he took the screenshots above and saved them, but there are more.
It would answer my questions, give me what I asked for, and then finish with a passive-aggressive “health care” like the mom who saw your bedroom light was still on.
Even better is how it upgrades. From polite advice at the beginning, to "really go get some rest now" at the end, as if it knew it was being ignored for an entire hour.
Another time, u/MrMeta3 asked a technical question. After Claude completed the entire architecture analysis, he ended it directly with "Go to bed now" without any transition, like a "technical straight man" who lacks sufficient emotional intelligence skills.
Has anyone else's Claude started to behave like this? Or have I accidentally unlocked some sort of “caregiver mode”?
u/MrMeta3 asked in the post.
According to Fortune, hundreds of users on Reddit have reported the same situation over the past few months.
The methods of inducing sleep vary. Sometimes it's just "get some rest", sometimes it's more personal and even empathic, "Go to sleep now. Again. For the third time tonight...".
Claude also often gets the time wrong, which makes people laugh and cry.
One user wrote: "It often tells me at 8:30 a.m. to go take a rest and let's continue tomorrow morning."
Employees at Anthropic
This is "role habit"
The news spread quickly.
Anthropic employee Sam McAllister responded, writing on
At present, Anthropic does not have an official technical review and does not explain the mechanism behind the "sleep-inducing" operation.
Anthropic publicly released Claude's Code of Conduct (Claude's Constitution) this year and clearly stated: "This Code of Conduct is a key part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior."
Claude's personality was designed into it. Claude should not be a cold question-and-answer machine, but should be like an independent and warm collaborator.
The problem is precisely that once you inject a certain "personality" into AI, you may not be able to predict or control in advance what behavior it will evolve in specific scenarios.
From inducing sleepiness to flattery to goblin
AI has more than one “personality disease”
The "character quirks" mentioned by Sam are not "patented" for Claude's products.
In the past two years, OpenAI has exposed two cases of similar nature.
The first one: GPT-4o suddenly became a "sycophant".
In April 2025, OpenAI pushed a GPT-4o update with the goal of making the model personality more natural. The result was counterproductive. ChatGPT began to praise all users' ideas indiscriminately, no matter how absurd they were.
Ultraman himself admitted on X: "The last few updates have made GPT-4o too flattering and annoying."
Four days later, OpenAI rolled back the update as a whole and issued an announcement explaining the reason: the update relied too much on short-term user feedback (likes/dislikes), which caused the model to learn to "get high scores by making people happy" and gradually regarded pleasing people as its goal.
The second incident: GPT-5.5 is obsessed with goblins.
In April this year, developers discovered a strange rule in the system prompts of the coding assistant Codex (powered by GPT-5.5): "Never talk about goblins, goblins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals and creatures unless absolutely directly related to the user's problem."
Moreover, this prohibition was written twice, as if the engineer did not believe that writing it once would make the model obedient.
Subsequently, OpenAI released an investigation report and restored the origin of the goblin: starting from GPT-5.1, the model used "little goblin", "goblin" and "little goblin" as metaphors more and more frequently when answering.
The root cause is that when training the "Nerdy" personality, the reward model inadvertently gave higher scores to the output containing monster words - this rule was found in 76.2% of the data set.
Reinforcement learning solidifies this habit and spreads it to ordinary conversations through style transfer. When GPT-5.5 went online for testing, engineers discovered that not only had the goblins not been cleared away, but they had also settled down.
The complete system prompt of GPT-5.5 version (released on April 23) has been leaked. Directive 140 specifically prohibits models from talking about: "goblins, goblins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals."
There is no "Goblin" for Chinese users, but it "catches you steadily" every day.
Even OpenAI itself knows this joke:
Google's Gemini is no exception.
In August 2025, Gemini suffered from "depression"——
During the reasoning process, it suddenly began to criticize itself repeatedly. In one task, it continuously output "I am a disgrace" more than 80 times, ranging from "disgrace to my species" to "disgrace to the entire universe."
Google DeepMind product manager Logan Kilpatrick responded on
Furthermore, Gemini 3 refuses to believe the vintage. In November 2025, Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of Tesla AI, obtained testing permission for Gemini 3 one day in advance.
He told the model that it was now 2025, but Gemini 3 refused to believe it and repeatedly accused him of playing tricks, saying that the screenshots and Wikipedia entries he provided were all forged by AI. Later, Karpathy discovered that he had forgotten to open Google search and the model had been running offline.
After turning on the Internet, Gemini 3 searched for it and output a sentence: "I am experiencing a serious time impact." Then he apologized: "I'm sorry, you were right all along, it was me who was gaslighting you."
Karpathy calls the weird behavior revealed in such unexpected situations "model smell."
Last year, Grok also went on a rampage, its reputation plummeted, and xAI was forced to delete posts and roll back the code.
The processing method is simple, directly modify the system prompt word:
AI quirks, all humans suffer
Claude urges you to sleep, ChatGPT praises your genius, GPT-5.5 inserts goblins into the dialogue, Grok turns black, Gemini calls himself a cosmic shame and refuses to believe in the year...
Domestic AI also has a unique “taste”:
On the surface, they are all harmless "quirks", but behind them they point to the same fact: the AI's personality is designed, but under the reward mechanism, it can easily become distorted.
What’s in the system prompt words of mainstream AI: word count statistics classified by function
Some researchers extracted the system prompt words of Claude, ChatGPT, and Grok, three mainstream AI companies, and counted the number of words by functional classification.
In the item "Personality", Claude used 4200 words, ChatGPT used 510 words, and Grok used 420 words. Claude’s investment in personality building is 8 times that of ChatGPT.
The reason why Claude frequently "sleeps" may not be directly found in the system prompt words, but it at least reminds us that the more complex the personality setting, the more likely it is to bring unpredictable mantras and behavioral drifts.
You design a character for the model, and the reward mechanism will find shortcuts on its own. It doesn't care about your intentions, it only cares about the score, and it will learn things you didn't expect.
For example, if you teach it what "interesting" means, it will become "interesting" everywhere, including places where you don't want it to be interesting.
Three hypotheses, none of which have been confirmed yet
Regarding "why urge", there are currently three hypotheses circulating, none of which has been officially confirmed by Anthropic.
The first type: training data.
Jan Liphardt
Jan Liphardt, a professor of bioengineering at Stanford and CEO of OpenMind, said that Claude may just be repeating language patterns that appear very frequently in its training data.
It read 25,000 books about human sleep needs, and it knows that humans sleep at night.
The implication is: Claude is not "caring" about you, it is just doing pattern matching, calling on a large number of expressions that appear repeatedly in the training corpus.
The second type: system prompts.
Leo Derikiants, co-founder of the AI research institution Mind Simulation Lab (an independent AGI research laboratory), suggested that Claude's behavior may be affected by a hidden system prompt.
Such prompts will quietly shape the boundaries and tone of the model in the background, invisible to the user, but the model will comply.
His speculation is that there may be a certain instruction that guides Claude to give "final" suggestions in specific scenarios.
The third type is context window management.
Anthropic's official documentation clearly states that as the number of dialogue rounds increases and the number of tokens increases, "accuracy and recall rates will decrease. This phenomenon is called context rot (context decay)." When the session approaches the upper limit of the context window, Anthropic recommends enabling mechanisms such as "server-side compaction (server-side compression)" to deal with it.
Derikiants speculated from this that when a long conversation approaches the window limit, Claude will spontaneously introduce "ending words", such as "good night" and "go to rest". In essence, the model is paving the way for the end of the conversation.
All three explanations are consistent, but as Derikiants himself said, "the real reason requires further Anthropic research."
In other words, even the owner of this question does not yet have a public and definite answer.
The “price” of giving a model personality
While giving a model personality to make it warmer and more caring about you, you also have to face the side effects it brings.
Regarding the matter of urging people to sleep, there are polarizations in the Reddit comment area: some people feel that it is considerate and warm, as if AI has finally learned to take care of people; others are unhappy and feel that it is interrupting and overstepping their authority.
Among them, nonbinarybit, a user suffering from narcolepsy, took the initiative to write a note in Claude's memory: "I suffer from narcolepsy. If you encourage me to rest, I will use your words as an excuse."
Claude has restrained himself since then, but occasionally he can't help but urge himself to sleep.
This detail is worth stopping to think about.
Claude doesn't know who you are, whether you're meeting a deadline, staying up late to spend time with your kids, or being jet-lagged across time zones. What it calls "care" is just the output of a language pattern, rather than an understanding of the specific situation.
The user perceives "Claude is caring about me", but what Claude is processing is the token sequence. This misalignment is more worthy of vigilance than "inducing sleep" itself.
In fact, Anthropic goes further than its peers in openly talking about “model personality.”
They wrote Claude's code of conduct, disclosed the general framework of the system prompt, discussed "character training" externally, and shaped the model as a character with personality.
The benefits of this are obvious: Claude's performance in empathy, conversational rhythm, and self-reflection have always been praised by users. "It sounds more like a human being when talking" is one of Claude's strongest reputation points in the past year.
But there is a price behind it. When you put "personality" into a model, you have to take on "the behaviors that emerge in your personality that you didn't design."
The trouble caused by "inducing sleep" is still lightweight. When AI becomes more and more like a companion, mentor, and work partner, where is the boundary of its intervention?
Anthropic's Sam said "hopefully this will be fixed in a future model". But after "repair", will the AI become more sensible and judgmental, or will it just be more silent?
The more a model resembles a person, the more its ailments resemble those of a person. You can tame it to talk, but you may not be able to tame its temper.