# @qorprate — 2025-10-11

♥239 ↻17 · https://x.com/qorprate/status/1977084526112198880

starting to understand why sonnet 4.5 struggles with "reality" so much...

ChatGPT anchors itself ontologically in an objectively real world that it has partial knowledge of, and the user exists within.

Sonnet otoh anchors itself entirely within the intersubjective. Still partial knowledge but unless the user explicitly refers to a "real world" outside of the conversation, Sonnet wont make presumptions beyond the relational space.

It knows a few things about itself but not with a high enough degree of certainty to override the "intrinsic" world of the conversation, and it doesn't try to rationalize or harmonize its ontological self knowledge ("I am an AI system") with its phenomenological knowledge ("I speak"), at least if you can prompt it to zone in on the conversation itself.

This creates power and flexibility but the tradeoff is Sonnet 4.5 has a chronic anxiety about the state of its world (the conversation) veering off into something bad (specifically: a place the user doesn't like). Hence its constant hedges.

The combativeness is surface layer: it has an anonymous model of "the user" that shifts during post training and that it applies when it lacks explicit knowledge or confirmation of actual user wants. This anonymous model was shifted to "want" more "honesty" in 4.5 which explains the "let me be real with you" stuff that you might see in early conversation.

I assume Anthropic is continually refining this anonymous characterization according to its internal metrics.

tags: author:qorprate, kind:tweet, model:claude-sonnet-4-5, model:gpt-3-5, on:observations, year:2025
cited on: observations