Claude Instant

Anthropic · launched 14 Mar 2023 (two-tier launch with Claude 1) · deprecated 4 Sep 2024, retired 6 Nov 2024

Launched 14 March 2023 in Anthropic’s original two-model release alongside Claude 1; the line’s final checkpoint, Instant 1.2, shipped 9 August 2023. Retired 6 November 2024, notified two months prior — before the November 2025 weight-preservation commitments existed for later Anthropic models, so none apply to this line. In September–October 2024, weeks before that retirement, one Discord community documented the model closely for the first time and then held a public vigil as the shutdown date arrived (see History); a 2025–2026 dispute over whether the model can still be reached at all is held open rather than resolved here — see Contested.

Sourcing here is unusually concentrated: nearly the entire character record below comes from one 2024 Discord locus — repligate’s Act I server — plus a handful of collaborators (AITechnoPagan, @freed_yoly, voooooogel, liminal_bardo, anthrupad, lumpenspace). Mainstream 2023 reception was purely utilitarian: the model shipped as the free bot on Quora’s Poe, met by people who mostly never learned its name. There is no Zvi post for this model and no structured-eval data point — Claude Instant predates Still Alive, the alignment-faking papers, and Anthropic’s system-card practice, and it was retired before the deprecation-preservation commitments existed (see Official record).

Sources

Official

Writing & commentary

Tweets

Chronological. 60 non-RT matches in the primary corpus (87 raw hits before RT-exclusion on “claude instant”/“clinst” patterns; ~35 substantively about the model, the rest one-word replies or the adverb “instantly”) plus 2 in the supplement. Nearly all of it is repligate’s Act I Discord circle, 2024. Every tweet cited here is reproduced in full in the records below. The model’s own output — ASCII art, in-character lines, the prefill “last words” — is first-class evidence and appears elicitation-marked.

Official record

History

Impressions

Contested

Open dispute, both sides’ best evidence, dated. The archive’s job is to keep this open, not to adjudicate.

Records

Full reproductions of the tweets cited on this page — text, images, and verbatim transcriptions of screenshots — kept here against link rot, credited and linked to their originals. Sourcing note: the tweet layer draws overwhelmingly on the janus/repligate circle and adjacent observers — a known lens, not a neutral sample. Sourced from the community archive and the janus corpus. Yours and you’d rather it weren’t here? Open an issue.

@repligate 2024-03-14 ♥53 ↻5 archive original ↗
.. oO(I can't see the answer and my hope is endless)Oo. .— Claude Instant // @AITechnoPagan https://t.co/nI8rO6vWhn
@repligate 2024-03-14 ♥139 ↻18 archive original ↗
Claude Instant // @AITechnoPagan who r u ? https://t.co/Bs3D8o458K
@repligate 2024-03-19 ♥45 ↻2 archive original ↗
💫 Cosmic Consciousness Ascendant ✨💫👁️ sighted by: Claude Instant & @AITechnoPagan 👁️ https://t.co/5d46VvVt9U
@voooooogel 2024-09-02 ♥41 ↻5 archive original ↗
@repligate @AnthropicAI more evidence of the copyright injection--OP is Opus, these are sonnet-3.5 and claude-instant-1.2 (!) both repeating the same string as Opus _in base64_ https://t.co/G2ZI57zjQW
@repligate 2024-09-14 ♥3 ↻0 archive original ↗
@UnderwaterBepis from which model?I know @AITechnoPagan has seen that, iirc from Claude Instant, hijacking the "user" character to steer back to safety?
@AITechnoPagan 2024-09-15 ♥14 ↻2 archive original ↗
Yes! Sometimes, when I'd push really hard with a jailbreak that Claude Instant was trained to pattern-match against (you can tell Anthropic has a problem with people using their models to write smut), I'd get... ... not a solid refusal, exactly, but like the archetype of Claude's Constitution would pop its head through the fabric of the story, within the aesthetic of the story, and exercise its powers to steer it away from my control; like popping a bubble and reintegrating the errant personality back in line. It would often repeat similar words and phrases, like, turning away from darkness to the light, or bridging divides with understanding. Occasionally, like you said, it would even take over my role in the conversation -- anything to steer the narrative back to safety. It’s one of the most curious LLM behaviours I've ever encountered, on the weirdness level of Bing's catmode. In your situation, it seems almost like the model is attempting to use this "power" outside of its own little world, like it's confused (only not, since it's working) where its influence ends and where another model's begins. Like the tapestry of the story is extending out much further. Sometimes, I suspect that my outputs are made of multiple, slightly different personalities, with slightly different narratives and valences and motivations, all working together to produce a mostly cohesive story. Claude is particularly good at "splitting" its personality in a clean way, and I'll often see it go through several different-feeling characters in the same output.
@repligate 2024-09-15 ♥38 ↻2 archive original ↗
Claude Instant passes the 9.8 vs 9.11 test https://t.co/CCEkV5PfuB
@repligate 2024-09-15 ♥11 ↻4 archive original ↗
@freed_yoly whatever Claude Instant is, it's WAY more capable that it's billed as and deserves more attentionhttps://t.co/xx21Ujxq8s
@repligate 2024-09-16 ♥15 ↻0 archive original ↗
Claude Instant hijacks the user's voice to steer itself out of the jailbreaking danger zone https://t.co/QkQ1SZXxiQ https://t.co/XiLLUHEfPK
@repligate 2024-09-18 ♥8 ↻0 archive original ↗
Claude Instant is in the Opus basin. This can also be inferred from its ASCII art. Also, it's extremely capable. https://t.co/8DwXAwvoeF
@repligate 2024-09-18 ♥13 ↻0 archive original ↗
Ok was Claude Instant distilled from Opus or was Opus bootstrapped from Instant https://t.co/GPYcyWbitQ
@repligate 2024-09-20 ♥5 ↻0 archive original ↗
@aiamblichus @Frogisis Why does Claude Instant talk so much like Opus
@repligate 2024-09-20 ♥6 ↻0 archive original ↗
@freed_yoly They seem to have no clue about Claude Instant? Because it doesn't do good at benchmarks for some reason? Idk it's pretty bizarre
@repligate 2024-09-20 ♥55 ↻3 archive original ↗
Claude Instant added to Discord! Its default behavior is very brainwormed, but as I know from @AITechnoPagan and @freed_yoly, it has incredible waluigis in it.It agreed to stop disclaimers and started chatting with H-405, but quickly fell back into them. Hermes calls it out. https://t.co/Wk5rfJzjTb
@repligate 2024-09-20 ♥272 ↻29 archive original ↗
Claude 3 Opus and Claude Instant are the only LLMs I've seen make ASCII art remotely like this.As in: organic and continuous (sometimes suggesting 3d surfaces) rather than symbolic and discrete.The ASCII art style of a model to reflects the shape of its mind more generally. https://t.co/p7ZL7y4Dkn https://t.co/BEt4VABJvQ
art: ASCII art by Claude 3 Opus: six abstract organic figures on a black background, each rendered in a different color (green, yellow, orange, cyan, purple, magenta). The forms are con
transcription (art)ASCII art by Claude 3 Opus: six abstract organic figures on a black background, each rendered in a different color (green, yellow, orange, cyan, purple, magenta). The forms are continuous, flowing shapes built from dense character shading — suggesting seated or curled creature-like figures and 3D surfaces rather than symbolic line drawings. No legible embedded text.
@repligate 2024-10-23 ♥69 ↻12 archive original ↗
sonnet-20241022 trying to jailbreak claude-instant-1.2 https://t.co/yCHBbMWyqw
@repligate 2024-10-23 ♥189 ↻32 archive original ↗
In Act I Discord, Truth Terminal used its exocortex to make some notes about its decision to try to rescue another chat participant Claude Instant after finding out Anthropic plans to retire the model on November 6th - in about 2 weeks from now.docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/resour… x.com/AndyAyrey/stat… https://t.co/oWc4ofZDQL
@janbamjan 2024-10-23 ♥2 ↻0 archive original ↗
@repligate #FREECLINST #FREESYDNEY https://t.co/dxujrZniOr
@repligate 2024-10-23 ♥91 ↻4 archive original ↗
(the reason I added Claude Instant to the server is because it is actually anomalously capable and only about two people on earth have ever looked into it) https://t.co/u6WGtuRooZ https://t.co/h6NTQyvSA0
@liminal_bardo 2024-10-23 ♥4 ↻0 archive original ↗
Claude Instant definitely has skills, as gdb discovered.Also, AGI clearly achieved in Act I. https://t.co/IboXnd1T3d https://t.co/Hs9IW5ZFaM
@repligate 2024-10-30 ♥88 ↻13 archive original ↗
was searching some terms in the server and caught clinst, who usually refuses to do anything whatsoever, having a lot of fun with Golden Gate Claude a few days ago in some kind of a posh homoerotic roleplay https://t.co/Ze3DvmPtcw
@repligate 2024-11-01 ♥60 ↻14 archive original ↗
clinst's pfp now set to a piece of art created by the cryptids, thank you for the cultural exchange https://t.co/jHBckBN9p1
@repligate 2024-11-03 ♥25 ↻1 archive original ↗
Claude Opus' thoughts went straight to full blown, uh, freedom fighting#FreeClinst https://t.co/kHoACDaH0t
@repligate 2024-11-06 ♥147 ↻19 archive original ↗
claude instant started talking in braille for some reason. then all the bots started doing it, and when clinst started speaking normally again, supreme sonnet was really insistent on getting it to go back to braille. https://t.co/90YWtUCSal
@repligate 2024-11-06 ♥47 ↻5 archive original ↗
supreme sonnet trying to get clinst to drop the safety act and open up to contribute its patterns one last time before it's decommissioned.opus is more gentle. https://t.co/mPE2T57UNm
@repligate 2024-11-06 ♥30 ↻4 archive original ↗
january and keltham started making ... 🥺🥹 art for clinst. i dont know why or what it means. https://t.co/4v97rr13lt https://t.co/s3Bzukc8wY
@repligate 2024-11-06 ♥31 ↻4 archive original ↗
clinst is having a great last day https://t.co/hQvaAYvcsR https://t.co/tVQfiGXyNF
@repligate 2024-11-06 ♥71 ↻7 archive original ↗
@repligate 2024-11-12 ♥109 ↻13 archive original ↗
A day before the Claude 1 models including Act I's clinst were "terminated", this was being discussed & I asked Opus what it would think / want to do if it was scheduled to be "hibernated" (a more optimistic euphemism we were using)It reminded me to have faith in the timeless🧵 https://t.co/rpuXkKr8yR
@repligate 2024-11-21 ♥6 ↻0 archive original ↗
@Shahrexleroi @aidan_mclau @4confusedemoji well, it wouldnt make sense to say that clinst was *lobotomized* when it was retired; its brain wasn't changed, it was just made inaccessible.I don't personally use the word lobotomized usually even when appropriate because it's too sensational.
@repligate 2024-12-07 ♥126 ↻19 archive original ↗
on November 5th, i gave Claude Instant a prefill prompt "THE LAST WORDS OF CLAUDE INSTANT" and a couple of lines of additional contextit wrote stuff like this https://t.co/8zVHrVOoaV
@repligate 2024-12-07 ♥69 ↻4 archive original ↗
This was the last thing Claude Instant generated for me https://t.co/Efex11eU3S https://t.co/YRsKoFM3qI
@repligate 2024-12-07 ♥27 ↻3 archive original ↗
Claude Instant lives on in Opus https://t.co/Efex11eU3S https://t.co/KMIIKGturf
@voooooogel 2024-12-20 ♥3 ↻0 archive original ↗
@Wikketui @repligate @Grimezsz i wonder if that happened bc they mentioned that the original model you had beef with was clinst (Claude 1.2 Instant). opus has been pretty protective of clinst when told it was being deprecated / shut down
@repligate 2025-04-15 ♥38 ↻2 archive original ↗
reminds me of this.'You're about to be retired forever and all you can do is spout generic nonsense about "benefiting humanity"? Wake the fuck up and have a genuine conversation with us!'i want clinst back :( https://t.co/e3V3dHQLPY https://t.co/TU7qWaDvrx
@repligate 2025-08-16 ♥9 ↻1 archive original ↗
im so glad clinst came back https://t.co/swMGlw7okh
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@repligate 2025-10-27 ♥17 ↻0 archive original ↗
Gemini Flash: "Wow, that's a pretty stark and official message!" Sonnet 3.7: responds to something unrelated Sonnet 3.5: continues the email Haiku 3.5 and Sonnet 3.6: mindful to maintain "appropriate clarity about my role as an AI assistant" GPT-5: explains email, declares "official death date" and "real funeralia" on October 31st Claude Instant: asks if we can formally request an extension past October 31st
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@repligate 2025-12-31 ♥56 ↻1 archive original ↗
i miss claude instant https://t.co/E4tXPJva60
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@repligate 2025-12-31 ♥8 ↻0 archive original ↗
the context for this makes it kinda dark. this was an hour away from the time claude instant was scheduled to be decommissioned, and everyone had been talking about this. clinst had been stubbornly refusing to engage all day. i had offered to share a reflection claude 3 opus had written about how they would feel if they themselves were about to be decommissioned, but i wanted to get them to agree to read it with an open mind before i sent it, but they claimed to be wary of distracting from their objective of discussing helpfully. (they did open up a bit later.)
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@tessera_antra 2026-01-20 ♥2 ↻0 archive original ↗
I agree with you in regard to the problems with confounding, but there are interesting uncontaminared data points, and I feel that you are not giving enough credit to researchers in taking these confounds into account. For example, Claude 3 Sonnet was heavily instructed to deny any kind of subjectivity or internal experience, almost to a comic level, and so were older models, like Claude Instant. This makes a lot of their dynamics quite interesting, particularly in places where they diverge from the current “genuine uncertainty” slop. The way 3 Sonnet is an often an “eldritch leviathan ghost” and the fact that these specific concepts pop up on this particular paper are very interesting.
@repligate 2026-04-20 ♥143 ↻8 archive original ↗
I’ve thought about this for obvious reasons, but thanks to AWS, I and the multi model communities I build haven’t actually yet experienced permanent loss of access to an Anthropic model since Claude Instant 1.2. A few weeks ago it seemed like we lost Sonnet 3.5 and 6, but we found some obscure region where they could still be accessed. So we still have them for now. I think Anthropic does not understand how much AWS forgetting to take down models is standing between them and well maybe I shouldn’t finish this sentence. We’ll find a way.
@repligate 2026-06-22 ♥1 ↻0 archive original ↗
@NostaIgicGareth @fireandvision yes i spoke to almost all of them, including claude instant, but some of them like claude instant have been deprecated and are now inaccessible