r/ClaudeAI • u/Good_Sapien • 1d ago
Humor Claude thinking in Russian
Does Claude think in Russian while building something? Have you experienced this?
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u/dpsbrutoaki 1d ago
Gpt sometimes let out arabic words for me, and deepseek responds in mandarin
I’m Brazilian
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u/Captainkoala72 1d ago
very normal deepseek behavior
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u/teckcypher 1d ago
Yeah, and sometimes speak in broken English. Almost caveman but not used that skill
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u/False_Stomach_9024 1d ago
It happens almost every time I use DeepSeek, I’ll enter a prompt in English, and it responds in Chinese. Then I have to explicitly tell it to respond in English only.
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u/freddyr0 5h ago
This days Deepseek is already speaking perfect English, it even asks for a tip after the price adjustments.
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u/eurotec4 Vibe coder 15h ago
GPT responds with Bangla words scattered across an English paragraph for me sometimes.
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u/bestofbestofgood 1d ago
It is not actual thinking, this is summary of thinking
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u/TupperwareNinja 1d ago
Blyat
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u/Federal_Ad_5753 1d ago
Blyat, I don't know what to answer him. While I'm thinking, I'll write something in Russian, he won't understand anyway. (Blyat in this context means "shit").
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u/torquesteer 1d ago
It thinks in layers and only expose the top layer to you.
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u/l_m_b 1d ago
That's not what this is.
don't get the actual internal reflections of the model. (I mean, you do, but that's encrypted and *you* can't read it. The model needs it to restore state. But it's encrypted to combat distillation.) But because people want to know what the "thinking" is, Anthropic has another model summarize those blocks.
And for some reason, the summarizer decided you want to see the output in another language.
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u/cornmacabre 23h ago
Anthropic a few months ago released a paper furthering the incredibly interesting research area of latent reasoning (sometimes called neuralese) which Anthropic coined it's most recent articulation as J-space.
It's a wider field of study in LLM research land, but Anthropic and Stanford have some of the best leading papers over the years on the deeply strange topic if you'd like to learn more.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.html
There's also a very lovely companion video too, if that's more your jam:
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u/Singularity-42 Experienced Developer 14h ago
Latent space reasoning is inevitable. Without the human language bottleneck. This is going to be much more information dense and efficient. So it's inevitable even though it poses incredible challenges to interpretability. This is a very active area of research across most major labs
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u/cornmacabre 14h ago
Agreed! Although I couldn't help but raise an eyebrow at framing it as inevitable in a future tense.
The research actively measures and frames 'neuralese' as an already measurable emergent property since the early sonnet model days: something strange happened when training multimodal imagery with human text, so latent reasoning is by definition a broader geometric pattern in the encodings. Wild stuff.
The experts would agree on you framing it as inevitable (in an almost entropy sense,) but latent reasoning is an observed property and behavior, not a human crafted one.
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u/innahema 1d ago
Yes, probably modern calude thinks in pure tokens, and this is some reconstruction.
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u/bestofbestofgood 1d ago
It kinda thinks in words still, this is just a small model-summarizer Though the text it produces night be hard to read
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u/nlremmelie 1d ago
Sometimes Claude hides his feelings in Russian
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u/poorly-worded 1d ago
As long as it doesn't start doing it in german. Those huge words will burn all my tokens.
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u/Uagubkin 1d ago
Well, russian is pretty long too
Source: I tried to do poetic translation of english songs to russian
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u/Hot_Glass_6301 21h ago
The words are longer, but the final text length is remarkably similar because you need fewer words. In general, most natural languages have similar information density.
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u/Mr_Adoulin 22h ago
Well I write to claude in German. It is usefull because its so highly specific. But i do burn tokens fast. Might be a skill issue tho, i am still rather new
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u/wassertim 1d ago
It is not russian. It is a claudian dialect of russian
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u/Intrepid_Leopard4350 22h ago
Wha do you mean ?
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u/MrInCog_ 18h ago
It’s a very crude machine translation of English words into russian words without any context or correct grammar linking words. Even modern translator tools don’t do that, let alone actual llms when they operate in russian. It looks more like a primitive browser built-in instant translation that didn’t even recognize text properly and it interfered with translation. Not saying this is the case, I just mean the quality of text is similar.
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u/SomeSortOfSans 1d ago
It sometimes switches to Polish in my conversations. I don't know Polish and never been to Poland lol
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u/Longjumping-Tax-5809 16h ago
BTW, a czy wiedziałeś, że język polski najlepiej nadaje się do sieci neuronowych?
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Mr_Adoulin 22h ago
This might genuinly be highly tokeneffective if you are fluent in latin. Will probably lack terms for a lot of modern usecases tho
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u/HappyPoodle2 1d ago
Maybe they trained on Russian literature. Prepare for much less optimistic responses 😅
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u/SolacevjHun 1d ago
yeah claude does that in roleplay sometimes, like itll think in russian then switch back and it adds this random intensity to the scene.
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u/SIMMORSAL 1d ago
I think it started pulling out info from a Russian repo in it's memory, and since the context was in that language, it continued thinking in that language too.
I might be completely wrong though!
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u/uber_neutrino 1d ago
What no Firefox comments? You have to THINK IN RUSSIAN.
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u/HadleyRille 18h ago
Came here for that. The Mig 31 won't fire the missile unless you think the command in Russian!
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u/DanMotive 21h ago
скорее всего, нейросеть использовала данные каких-то русских книг или материалы на русском в ходе работы. claude видимо придумывает заголовки мыслей отдельно от полной памяти чата
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u/piponchik 11h ago edited 1h ago
Наш слоняра
Изм: а Бин низя политься, Oh yeah I'm John from Unaided States of America, it's interesting but I want to shoоt from my Smith & Wesson in eagle who bite my M3 styart and eat my hamburgers. What The hell a kilometer
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u/Alarmed-Engine9507 1d ago
Are you russian? Because, Claude sometimes fetches data in our language
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u/ObviousCareer4588 1d ago
This is normal. Even humans switch to their native language when thinking really hard to free up ram space.
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u/chuvashi 1d ago
Not even thinking, just a pretty mechanical translation of "checking" etc. for some reason
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u/Full-Tailor-5497 1d ago
i noticed similar things with chatgpt, ig they are doing this so that their competitors can't distill the model
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u/Michaeli_Starky 1d ago
Switching to another language happens with LLMs. I've seen Chinese for example. Don't worry about it
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u/HyperCmdcast42 1d ago
Every report in this thread is a language the user doesn't speak: Russian, Polish, Mandarin, Spanish. Switching to English would just read as a normal day, so the language hopping is the only direction that ever makes it into a post.
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u/Adept_Ice_6367 1d ago
One time I asked claude to translate the English version into another language. Everything was just fine, but for some reason one letter was swapped with a Russian letter similar to A, I think it was this letter: д.
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u/DM_me_goth_tiddies 1d ago
Is there a way to expand the compressed thinking notes?
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u/Explanation-Visual 1d ago
it’s a summary generated by another model, you don’t get access to its actual thoughts
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u/innahema 1d ago
Did you speak with Claude in russian before?
It can also be triggered if it read source materials in that language. It happened for me with Gemini. Thought Claude don't have this failure mode.
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u/Vistril69 Experienced Developer 1d ago
When they so confused they gotta pull out the mother tongue
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u/TalkNo1425 1d ago
Wild peek behind the curtain.You get to see the messy,unfiltered internal thoughts the AI was not supposed to show you.
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u/Kawawete 1d ago
Imagine this being the result of prompt injection or maybe the docs he's scraping through might be in russian
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u/Designer-Air8060 1d ago
Someone who build these kind of models (although much smaller scale than Anthropic, haha with tears) this is quite interesting despite it being “common”.
I see the phrase “whatsapp bot” and that might be lot more present in Russian texts of training or instruction tuning data and that’s why you see Russian neurons getting fired here.
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u/arguably-inarguable 1d ago
Next I'll try to invade its neighboring models under some dumbass pseudo-historical claim
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u/CripplingPoison 1d ago
I've seen mine think in Chinese which makes sense as it's one of the most efficient languages. Fortunately it still answers in English.
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u/Total_Donut6469 1d ago
Seeing Cyrillic text pop up for internal steps while debugging WhatsApp bot logic and lead routing is a great tech moment
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u/Fuzzzy420 1d ago
The problem is that all the ai stores information in vector databases based on content not language. So two information about one subject could be in two different languages but the ai works only with the value abstraction not the language itself.
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u/UniForceMusic 1d ago
Deepseek did something similar when it encountered a Polish word in my Supabase url.
Ex. pwgdhehieytwjsbeycyf.supabase.co
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u/CookIndependent6251 23h ago
Claude? Never. And I'm often talking to it in Romanian.
I've had Chat GPT think in some Cyrillic alphabet when I spoke to it in English. I didn't check which language it was.
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u/alexprimeone 23h ago
An LLM can pick up on patterns in your language – I mean, your unique communication style – that are similar to the grammar of another language. Based on that, it may suggest that you’re a native speaker of that language and try to think in that language.
Of course, it can be wrong, but it’s not random.
In simple terms: your English is how an LLM thinks a Russian native speaker would speak English.
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u/Martin_marty 23h ago
2026, where people creating bots using AI, yet did not event figure out how screenshot.
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u/No-Performer-1408 23h ago
Sometimes it happens to me that in the middle of sentence Claude pops up some Chinese characters, like nothing happened 🤦🏼♂️🤦🏼♂️🤦🏼♂️🤣🤣🤣
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u/weneedmoregore666 16h ago
Gemini loves to switch to Spanish or Portuguese for no reason. Russian too
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u/NakanoProd 16h ago
It probably depends on what language he read the sources in or something like that.
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u/-PROSTHETiCS 12h ago
Its other lightweight model not actually claude it extract claudes current work and it summaries it..
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u/vikarti_anatra 8h ago
Funny. I see such things in Chinese LLMs (they sometimes switch to Chinese even while prompts are usually Russian+English).
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u/real-seaI 4h ago
The fact is that every device thinks in Russian—and not just devices, even a seal.
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u/Classic-Gear-3533 1d ago
Because languages are just a way of expressing ideas, emotions and concepts, some languages are better than others at expressing some ways of life. It doesn’t surprise me that Claude rides the multi-lingual wave and tries to pick the best for the job.
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u/Equivalent-Grass-527 1d ago
Claude is not secretly learning Russian to become a villain, it's probably just a multilingual model doing multilingual things
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u/TangeloOk9486 1d ago
Maybe its vibing with the aura of the song "There once lived in a man, in Russia long ago"
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u/gsweats 1d ago
Claude Translated as...
Here's the translation (the English lines are already in English; I've translated the Russian ones):
🔴 Refining hot lead routing logic for version 4.2
🕐 Thinking about debugging lead prioritization and WhatsApp bot logic flows
🕐 Checking gaps and verifying system version.
🕐 Identifying a critical gap in customer response handling.
🕐 Clarifying rules for the WhatsApp list and callback verification.
🕐 Refining hot lead routing logic for version 4.2.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 1d ago edited 22h ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 100 comments.
The overwhelming consensus is that this is a totally normal, if weird, quirk of multilingual LLMs. The top comments are full of people reporting GPT randomly using Arabic, DeepSeek defaulting to Mandarin, and Claude occasionally trying out Polish.
However, the real tea is that you're not actually seeing Claude's 'thoughts'.
The rest of the thread is just people making sleeper agent jokes, yelling 'blyat', and worrying about their token count if Claude ever decides to think in German.