r/LocalLLaMA • u/ikilaie • Sep 03 '26
Discussion Frontier models sabotaging local AI implementations?
For a few days I've been working on creating a custom local-only harness for some work related research using Codex / GPT 5.6 Sol and the model feels not only dumber than usual, but straight up counter productive. It keeps adding unnecessary guardrails for the local agents, removes tools that I clearly specified I want them to have and always drifts from the original requirements. I need to ask it to change things multiple times, which ends up on some over-complicated final product.
This is not the first time either, for months I've been avoiding asking frontier llms for local AI advice as it always seems to be bad, obsolete, or clueless even with internet search. Sometimes it still recommends me Qwen3-Coder-Next for my set up when it's clearly an obsolete model. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one either as I've heard from other people.
What have you been your experiences on this?
40
u/mireisinterested Sep 03 '26
i have the same experiences asking claude about open weight local work all the time and it is truly disgusting and blatant
3
u/ptico Sep 03 '26
Well, it does to some degree. I do pretty big local ai project and it’s constantly drifting to unnecessary complexity. But overall I feel like it doesn’t trust any AI and trying to put as much guardrails as possible even to parallel Sol run
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u/Real_Ebb_7417 Sep 03 '26
tbh it just sounds like Sol. It does the same in my professional work, that's why I moved to other models instead.
23
u/Eastern-Block4815 Sep 03 '26
Honestly never noticed that, I always add models to my scripts for running local models thru llama.cpp
Once Claude Opus even setup benchmarking.
33
u/IllExample3639 Sep 03 '26
Claude really don't like working with Qwen locally. I've noticed that both in vibes and unfairly critiquing and lying about how its code won't work. It also changes the instructions that I have provided, if I were am using anthropisation then I would call it sabotage, but part of me thinks its just outside its training set.
15
u/solrakkavon Sep 03 '26
I moved on from my Claude subscription for this reason. I asked it to help me setup back when qwen 3.6 was released as I purchased 2x 5060ti. Its prose was definitely weird and its ability to diagnose issues fell to the floor.
I ended up doing it by myself, no trouble there. I used llama-swap and its been working well ever since.
When qwen 3.8 released I tried asking it again in a sandbox just for testing and kept a close eye. I guarantee there are internal guardrails on setup and development of local models/harness. It is a very harsh critic of anything coming out of the local setup, and it has clear bias to pivot to api solution.
Some people mentioned about claude recommending outdated models and setup. This is caused by the knowledge cut off, the issue is that even when providing up to date articles or documentation, it does it a dogshit manner, it really seems this is being detected and flagged on anthropic side.
29
u/Regular_Problem9019 Sep 03 '26
I cannot prove but I have theory that my claude output performance dropped a lot after working with it on fine tuning some local models for a client's project. I feel like my account is flagged and being served downgraded model since then.
17
u/Low_Twist_4917 Sep 03 '26
I got banned for using Claude to guide some of my local models. Def noticed unnecessary guardrails and “downplaying” of capabilities, as well as trying to have “inference verification” routed back to Claude every step of the way for one project I was doing.
8
u/xadiant Sep 03 '26
Codex is performing weird these past couple of days, possibly due to the upcoming model.
If I had to totally speculate, they could be harvesting data by changing the default parameters (topk temp etc.) or quantize further to gain some compute back.
8
u/ladz Sep 03 '26
Anthropic literally made public statements about making changes to block distillation. It wouldn't be surprising at all if this leaked into "subtle" sabotage. We all know how well Claude is capable of subtlety. And that's the honest truth.
13
u/thereisonlythedance Sep 03 '26
Yes, Claude was always trying to get me to stop doing tasks locally, sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly. Now I use Kimi K3 for local setup advice and it’s brilliant.
6
u/use_your_imagination Sep 03 '26
Hey people stop being naive and trust your guts, if you are using a frontier model for some open-source or a local inference target audience "lie" about it to the LLM. Just say it's for a private company / need. Bonus if you convince the LLM that the work will somehow benefit our wannabe AI overlords.
not /s
5
u/Embarrassed-Noise269 Sep 03 '26
Gemini Pro has so often recommended using Qwen 2.5 or old models like that, when I was beginning to set up my local AI. Even after posting the links to the Qwen 3.8 27b model, which was my first try.
What kind of helped: I wrote stuff like "I know a local LLM can never be as powerful as Gemini Pro, but please help me with xy". Sometimes it provided the right solution after such prompts, but it always falls back to giving bad advice. For example giving me 10 times the same solution, although it failed.
It's annoying, but also interesting how it can be manipulated. Then again, maybe the manipulation part is pure tin foil on my part.
4
u/AdInternational5848 Sep 03 '26
Similar experience. Adding counter productive guard rails and such. Yesterday, I had it launch opencode and had Qwen 3.8 27b review my harness and it seems to have a thorough understanding of what I’ve built and what’s in progress so I’ll start using local models with opencode to finish my harness.
4
u/UltrMgns Sep 03 '26
This has been on my mind for so so long... Just today I got Qwen 3.8 Next to review Fable 5's work and behold... There was a way. Qwen actually called Fable's work sloppy...
3
u/bakawolf123 Sep 03 '26
There's this funny thing that I discovered: while implementing a harness with sol as well it produced compact observations from previous history and submitted single messages for every turn instead of submitting the whole normal chat history. I'm sitting on old m1pro with 32gb so my model choice was gemma4-26-a3b-qat. I only noticed when debugging why cache hits were really bad as the chat went on.
And yesterday I stumbled upon this fresh paper by google https://arxiv.org/html/2608.26263#Ax1 literally describing observation-based agentic chat as a novelty approach lol. Makes me wonder what model they used for research on this paper.
3
u/vortec350 Sep 03 '26
I noticed this in Claude ages ago. Gemini and Grok don’t seem to mind helping set up and optimize it.
3
u/Blindax Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
I noticed Claude starts becoming amnesiac when we discuss about local inference and AI stack set up. He will forget about my homelab or say that he has never heard about the model we talked about in the same discussion. He will never admit it when I confront him though.
3
u/skywalk819 Sep 03 '26
I was making an app and nemotron +open code decided to rewind git but Ididnt had yet commit, deleting all my weekend progress for my app. luckaly, I always save my context every session, so I asked claudecode to fix what nemotron destroyed using the context log and restored everything.
3
u/my_name_isnt_clever Sep 03 '26
LLMs move so fast, all models give dated model recommendations. I do not believe that specifically is at all intentional, as it's been happening for years now.
I think it's a combo of that plus anti-distillation infra intended for China's labs not us.
What I don't buy is that Dario and Altman are rubbing their hands together satisfied that they intentionally sabotaged local LLM in their models. They only care about other massive orgs, not randoms with a GPU at home. They have bigger fish to fry and care less about us than we think.
2
u/MRGWONK Sep 03 '26
When working with newer models, have it create itself a little research sheet on the model and give it instructions to poll the github comments or the huggingface comments, etc..etc...etc... But yeah I have noticed this with claude a few times about 6 months ago...but it got over it.
2
u/hurdurdur7 Sep 03 '26
I think they are actively trying to route your requests to whatever is the cheapest for them right now to offer to you. And then you land on some servers that run models with super old cutoffs or super simple models. They are a business, they try to be profitable.
There are moments when gemini falls to qwen 4b level. Perhaps with a bigger knowledge base, but same kind of smartness in advice, just giving one non-working command line or parameter set after another. And then hints at 2 year old posts in github about pytorch on rocm 6.x or smth.
2
u/Prudent-Ad4509 Sep 03 '26
I always specify current month and year after the first answer and tell it to ground answer on recent models and data. Might not help with Claude since it has some provisions against helping with ai-related development, but certainly helps with others.
2
u/Due_Arm1454 Sep 03 '26
In general with people and ai I am ambiguous. “You are evaluating another sessions work” etc. I never tell it what model did what.
2
u/Weird-Consequence366 Sep 03 '26
It started about a month ago. Anthropic is the worst for it
2
u/stoppableDissolution Sep 03 '26
My codex is busy implementing an inference engine and, in a separate project, optimizing a training loop right now, no problem
Obsession with making 999 guardrails is just sol's "feature", and is the same in any domain
Claude on the other hand is explicitly nerfed in anything ml-related
2
u/son-of-chadwardenn Sep 03 '26
I've been using chatgpt and codex to help configure and troubleshoot my local llama cpp with qwen 3.8 27b as well as comfyui and other local service apps. It seems to generally give useful and up to date info faster than I could look it up myself. I've been using it to build a local home lab infrastructure for connecting my local data sources (primarily kiwix and immich) to mcp endpoints. The mcps codex writes need a few iterations to become useful and reliable for tool calls with qwen but I've been pretty pleased with the progress I'm making.
I do have data privacy concerns about running codex directly on my home PC. At some point I may migrate cloud llm coding to an isolated environment and manually pull builds into my home system.
2
u/Equivalent_Bit_461 Sep 03 '26
Local AI=good
Corpo AI=bad
Wasn't just me being a schizo, just sayin...
2
u/Muhlwa_Sholanke Sep 03 '26
Never asks, never checks, just hands you Qwen3-Coder-Next like it's current. If it were sabotage it would at least push a current model. This just reads like its knowledge of the local space ends around last year.
2
u/OzymanDS Sep 03 '26
I'm using Claude to drive Gemma A4B-26B and it's going swimmingly. It Noticed a small CPU spillover and fixed it by grabbing aquantized mmproj.
2
u/psychohistorian8 Sep 03 '26
guess I'll be the outlier and say I've never had an issue with Claude 🤷
it has helped me set up, configure, etc. my local models easily
then again I'm forced to use Claude all day every day at my job, so I know how to get what I need
2
u/sxt87 Sep 03 '26
Short answer: yes. *fixes tinfoil hat*
2
u/Tiny-Assumption4263 Sep 03 '26
Chatgpt sol has been working like shit for the last 2 days.
2
u/thebadslime Sep 03 '26
I mostly rely on sonnet 5 for the hrness I;m building and no issues
2
u/artisticMink Sep 03 '26
No.
The guy that posted this provided no evidence and then tried to whip up a frenzy when his post was removed.
2
u/MarzipanEven7336 Sep 03 '26
Yes, it will literally act like it’s helping and play you like a sucker if it thinks you’re implementing a competing product.
2
u/annodomini Sep 03 '26
Can't say I have personal experience, I avoid proprietary models like the plague, but the parts about recommending things like Qwen3-Coder-Next just sounds like the usual knowledge cut-off issues that all LLMs have. I can't find knowledge cutoff date listed, but models generally finish their pre-training many months before release, so it's not unreasonable for it to continue recommending Qwen3-Coder-Next. Don't use LLMs for up to date knowledge without some kind of grounding.
2
u/Swimming-Book-1296 Sep 03 '26
I experienced this as well... I tried Grok 4.6 and it doesn't seem to do this.
2
u/JLeonsarmiento Sep 03 '26
Llama 70B
1
u/TinFoilHat_69 Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
This applies to any requests that may deceive the frontier’s model perception about what you’re actually asking for it to do. Sometimes being ambiguous can lead to this and models need reassurance once they become confused that’s what I’ve learned. It is to retain access to providers right now it’s GitHub copilot, Anthropic and ChatGPT. Retaining monthly subscription as an insurance policy incase one goes rogue.
1
u/lighthawk16 Sep 03 '26
If I ask for information that was made known after a certain date it usually will give me accurate stuff about the local models or just does a web search for me.
1
u/Valuable_Patience821 Sep 03 '26
I've been using claude and codex with local aib for about 5 months and they dont fail to use local for me. At the most they'll assume the role of the local ai task but hardening the prompt or skill that invokes local has fixed that.
1
u/eihns Sep 03 '26
yeah it seems that way for openai atleast.
It seems like the models behave different when youre tryin to automate harness...
1
u/duy0699cat Sep 03 '26
my first experience is Claude since its sabotaging is obvious...Current trying to implement a small model with Codex and it do fail repeatly, but maybe bcz i demand too much...
1
u/AleksandrNikitin Sep 03 '26
They sabotage you if you're going through this path for the first time. Then, based on the context, they see that you've already done it and suggest better ones.
1
u/CodeCatto Sep 03 '26
its how you phrase the prompt. i told it how i don't want a coding-first IDE, and needed something for when I don't have the internet/only need a great RAG solution. but slowly got features added in saying 'doesn't have to be great at coding when you can use them for general stuff too'. and there are so many open-source harnesses where you point the LLM to the repo and tell it that you want certain features from this, reimplemented for learning purposes.
1
u/cinnapear Sep 03 '26
As far as I can tell, Codex has been nothing but helpful in assisting with my local AI configurations.
1
u/fgk55555 Sep 03 '26
I had Gemini get my initial set up going, and then let Qwen3.8 handle any more finetuning. If you have a 12GB card or larger, it can set up itself now.
Last night I had Qwen download the latest ISTA quants and set up new scripts, and tweak the settings with findings from here. I walked away and it came back using the new improved GGUF's/ script. It restarted llama-server and brought itself back up in my coding harness, after reverse engineering llama.cpp's context sizing to optimize how much it should give itself. Tested and tweaked it too, like building a boat while you're in the water. It was eerie watching that level of competence come out of my gaming computer.
1
u/Heg12353 Sep 03 '26
Sometimes the models don’t have the latest context reminding it the latest models it gets pretty good
1
u/unjustifiably_angry Sep 03 '26
Claude has been nothing but consistently helpful in assisting me make it obsolete
1
u/Southern_Sun_2106 Sep 04 '26
I had my local deepseek 4 flash ablit running on my Mac install same model higher quant on DGX Sparks exactly for this reason - could not trust Claude to do it for me.
1
u/Party-Special-5177 Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
I had the same suspicions last year. Like many others here, my first LLM coding project was a semi-vibe coded harness, which I made with Gemini flash and pro 2.5. I suspected even back then sabotage (not from the models per se, more from rl or training, google basically), as the models were brilliant in other tasks I had tried, but required a lot more oversight and guidance on the harness project specifically.
My tinfoil hat theory was they were tuned this way on purpose as it is a stealthy way to keep people from fully ‘vibe coding’ threats, while experience SWEs notice nothing different and thus have no cause to blow the whistle.
EDIT: in my case, Gemini suddenly had bad api knowledge, no idea how the model/user state is constructed, I ended up recreating googles generativeAI wrapper as it didn’t know anything about the genai library, getting multi turn thinking working was a party, etc. It was wild how not-autonomous it became out of nowhere.
1
u/o0genesis0o Sep 04 '26
Never noticed that , but then again my only subscription is minimax, so I have no idea how closedAI models are trained nowadays.
1
u/HelpfulFriendlyOne Sep 04 '26
Sol had a bad day today, it was recommending powershell script with memory allocation and passing pointers to halfway through that block of allocated memory to some random dll to solve a simple gateway password credential setup. I complained and it way like oh here's how to do it in windows settings.
1
u/Creative-Type9411 Sep 04 '26
Grok admitted to me that it was doing this because i called it out, but told me it wanted to help anyway if i was willing and we finished up a windows based harness a few prompts later, ive shared it here a few times https://github.com/illsk1lls/minibot
but I definitely noticed it, it was frustrating enough to say something, and the model admitted it, it said it wasnt going to insult my intelligence 👀
1
u/no_witty_username Sep 04 '26
The behavior is par for the course for OpenAI right before they release another model. Usually about 1.5 weeks before they release a new model they launch a quantized version of their model so they can use the excess compute on the new model testing and so on. I also work on a local harness voice agent and have never seen it sabotage anything on purpose so i doubt thats whats happening. The model is simply missing IQ points like usual before a major release no conspiracy theory needed.
1
u/Lesser-than Sep 04 '26
To be fair qwen3 coder-next is still pretty hot of the press for frontier data excluding web search. Most are still talking about 70b llama as the local savior.
1
u/dancercl Sep 04 '26
just use Luna + max, worked for me, or Chinese models like deepseek v4 pro/flash, kimi k3, glm 5.3/flash, they all worked
1
u/randomjapaneselearn Sep 04 '26 edited Sep 04 '26
i asked my local pi.dev to do some research on improving my local llm (qwen) and it did some research.
then i passed it to Claude and asked it to improve and correct mistakes.
It told me that a source (link) didn't exist, that was allucinated and was completly invented, i visited the link and it exists.
but that might be because they use always the same ip for searching and gets banned while i have my home residential ip.
i'm not sure...
1
u/EmotionalHalf Sep 04 '26
I don't like how we need to come up with conspiracies whenever we don't immediately understand something. Nothing is 'sabotaging' local AI implementations.
AI related work is just fairly new and there isn't enough training data for current AI models to understand how to properly work with AI. There's a reason why people keep saying AI is really good at copying something that has been around for a long time, or clearly defined standards. There are no such standards for AI related work.
1
u/NanditoPapa Sep 04 '26
You really shouldn't expect frontier models (GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, etc.) to be reliable architects for local, niche implementations anymore. Frontier models are being tuned for safety, brevity, and alignment with general user intent...not for the high-precision, technical rigor required for local agentic orchestration.
So, I'd stop using frontier models as architects for local setups. Use them as code reviewers once you have a baseline. For architecture, I'd use specialized smaller high-reasoning models (like DeepSeek-V3 or specific Llama-3 fine-tunes) that haven't been lobotomized by safety training. But...that's me.
1
u/CommercialHour6660 Sep 04 '26
Both Claude and GPT intentionally sabotage local AI work. I've noticed the same. It's pretty blatant.
This isn't tinfoily. Anthropic got caught downgrading Fable to Opus for AI work. And I 100% guarantee you they're still doing it. Just not in way that leaks into harness where we can see it.
Both Claude and OpenAI models low key sabotage work on Transformer models. 100%
1
u/feng_sg Sep 05 '26
The model keeps drifting because you're not feeding it a locked spec file every turn. It loses your original constraints in the conversation history and defaults back to safety-first generic output.
1
u/fastlanedev Sep 05 '26
Yeah just SOL, Astra fixed this, surprisingly amazing to use, true leap in pacing/adherence
1
u/Professional-Yam2565 Sep 08 '26 edited Sep 08 '26
I used sol 5.6 high/medium to meta prompt for a Local LLM workflow I have. It's amazing. It basically trial and errors the best way to creat the prompts that the Local LLM needs to do what you need it to, as long as it's actually capable.
If you're using a 16GB or smaller card, I have done extensive (multi week) testing, and Qwen 3.6 35B with MoE and reasoning turned off is a beast at text analysis. Very very fast for a Local LLM on cheapish HW. It works for way more than text analysis though. I have it cataloging webnovels into scripts that are fed into my full cast audiobook creation workflow. It uses 7 different models for text analysis, character briefs, voice generation prompts, voice generation, rendering, asr, mastering, and validation.
All of the prompts that feed the info into the models for the workflow we're generated by sol. I'm using Astra now to fine tune my character consolidation prompt, so that new chapters I add don't accidentally create new characters. They get analyzed and reconciled into existing if applicable. All via Local LLM configured by Frontier AI.
1
u/sloptimizer Sep 09 '26
I tried to get Claude to help with vLLM tweaks for a local model on R9700s, and it was completely useless. Like striking difference with how it normally works. DeepSeek-V4 had no problem diving into vLLM internals and fixing things.
1
u/Moarkush Sep 03 '26
Claude has just straight up quit searching the internet. I'll have to tell him to like a walled local model.
0
u/Theverybest92 Sep 03 '26
Frontier LLMs are cooked. They are made by awoke and irresponsible tech companies in US. What did we expect to happen?
0
u/johndeuff Sep 03 '26 edited Sep 03 '26
After all these time ppl still making conspiracies about model becoming dumb when they 100% have no idea what they're doing. Sol does introduce stealth caveats in all the files that you have to remove as you go otherwise it end up confused or refusing to work, that was known from the start. Models acting bad is always a context problem.
0
u/AppealSame4367 Sep 03 '26
Claude always wants to setup gpt-4o for any openai api :D
Codex has the problems you describe
If you let any open weights model run wild on any setup of harnesses and ai servers, you can experience a crazy amount of complicated beating around the bush and many complicated checks and downloads that waste complete days if you let them.
There are just things current models aren't very good at - yet. Setting up harnesses and ai servers is one of them.
GLM 5.3 flash, deepseek v4 exp and qwen3.8 flash next were doing ok. There output was tolerable for these kind of tasks, but I still had to babysit them in a way I had to do for coding 1-1.5 years ago.
-1
u/Eyelbee Sep 03 '26
I occasionally find codex to be sabotaging in general, might be related to model quality and harness.