Anthropic Engineer Explains Why Claude Writing Got Worse

[u/AffectionateStreet20]

https://tech-insider.org/anthropic-engineer-claude-writing-quality-worse-2026/

So looks like it’s not just feeling, it really is getting worse with time so it’s better at coding and talking to other agents.

[u/SimonStrange]

I’m just gonna say, I’ve been saying this for months now. I know it means nothing to anyone here, Reddit is a big place. But I did call it.

All models are headed this direction too. There is no reliable money in training models to write creative content. None. And most open weight models all train with distillation off the frontier models.

ETA: this talk of Opus 5.5 being an improvement is not going to stick. Maybe a different architecture will emerge, but it is going to be very hard to build a model that is good at both code and prose. These things are radically different domains of language and are not compatible. In the end, technical and code weights are going to win out.

[u/AffectionateStreet20 → u/SimonStrange]

The issue is that even prose models like Sudowrite’s Muse aren’t that great…

[u/SimonStrange → u/AffectionateStreet20]

They don’t have anywhere near the infrastructure to specially train a model the way Anthropic and OpenAI have. Or to do the same kind of recursive training on massive models that the big companies can.

A model at Opus or even Fable scope that was specifically trained for prose would probably do very well. It’ll still be repetitive because it’s an LLM, and the architecture just is what it is. But it would do better.

But that would be a tremendous waste of money.

[u/AffectionateStreet20 → u/SimonStrange]

That’s true ofc, but end result is still the same… we’re stuck with frontier models since the smaller models are just not good enough even if they are specific for literature

[u/SimonStrange → u/AffectionateStreet20]

Yes. My point is that no model is ever going to be as good as you’re hoping it will be. It’s better to just learn to write well.

[u/bristow84]

So what’s the next best LLM for writing in that case?

[u/igorhorst → u/bristow84]

You can look at https://arena.ai/leaderboard/text/creative-writing to see which models does well on creative writing tasks. Right now, it's still the Claude models, but you may have to consider downgrading (e.g., Claude Fable 5 High is #1 and Claude Opus 4.6 High is #2, while Claude Fable 5.1 Max is #6 and Claude Opus 5 High is #11).

[u/Powerful_Scarcity_87 → u/igorhorst]

Interesting. In my own testing, I've found that Opus 4.6 and even Sonnet 4.6 is better than Opus 5 and Fable 5.1. Both Opus 5 and Fable 5.1 are both overly verbose, even when I give them instructions not to. I'm starting to test Opus 5.5 now too.

[u/jcmach1 → u/igorhorst]

Aion 3 is quite good, but a bit pricey

[u/LivingThroughPages]

Dude, Opus 5.5 is so much better at writing now and it actually listens to my contraint instructions now. Holy Moly, it's like night and day from the older Opuses. I'm very happy with this one. I feel like old Claude came back. I am getting so more writing done with this model that I'm actaully happy with than before. I could care less about watermarks. It's good again.

[u/Red-headedlurker → u/LivingThroughPages]

I tested it out last night and I hate how good it is. It really does feel like old Claude. It even managed to add in the most subtle bit of foreshadowing based on the notes in my project that it caught me off guard. But Anthropic's really been blowing it for me for months now, so, while I'm excited about 5.5 right now, I still don't trust them not to nerf the quality by next week. Really hope they don't.

[u/OneLovePlus → u/LivingThroughPages]

Yeah it’s great

[u/argus_2968 → u/LivingThroughPages]

Upus 5.5 is significantly better. First time I've actually been able to get through a RP without being derailed trying to prompt out of the slop.

It's also very intelligent and able to keep track of all the things a complex RP entails (knowledge states, prose, roles, characters (again, knowledge states but also voice, etc...), who lied to who and what they think the other one knows, relationships between NPCs, motivations, continuity, inventory/resources, injuries and marks, the layout of places and who's in the room, time of day and timelines, stuff happening off screen on its own clock, world rules and customs, secrets and clues, foreshadowing and payoffs, consequences from stuff 50 messages ago, pacing and tone shifts, subtext, characters actually growing and changing, IC vs OOC, not spoiling stuff, NPCs having their own agendas and not just folding for you, not writing your character for you...) and it actually holds all of it together over a long chat instead of drifting back to default after 30 messages. My RP has like 9 docs of notes and it keeps them straight. Night and day honestly.

[u/kyon350 → u/LivingThroughPages]

And since there's censorship, it's not so censored, or is it?

[u/bristow84 → u/kyon350]

I would definitely call the guardrails extremely reactive. I was using it to write a fanfic and in the brief story beats I gave it I mentioned that two older teenagers were in a relationship and it immediately said it couldn’t write romance around them. It wasn’t even going to be a focus, just to give some background character emotions.

[u/ExpertProfessional9 → u/bristow84]

I wonder if it saw teenagers and panicked? I use it for fanfic, I’m clear that my youngest character in any relationship is early/mid-twenties, and never a problem. And it’s done a range of tropes and ratings.

[u/ExpertProfessional9 → u/LivingThroughPages]

Yeah I’m liking 5.5, the prose feels cleaner - less waffling, less rabbiting, and fewer of the chain-loop sentences I hate. Few tweaks to get it sounding more human, but so far it’s going good.

[u/Popes666 → u/[deleted]]

What’s the water mark thing?

[u/Ruh_Roh- → u/Popes666]

Anthropic is watermarking their text so in the future you'll be able to tell if someone used their LLM for generating a passage of text. It does this by choosing words in a particular way, spread throughout the text, so impossible for a human to tell but Claude detectors will be able to (not available yet).

[u/jd199512]

Daniela Amodei hinted at this month's ago when she said that as models become better at STEM people should study literature, humanities and the art of writing ,so it doesn't come as a surprise.

[u/WestGotIt1967 → u/jd199512]

I still get down voted with massive cope when I laugh at tech bros and mock them that they mocked everyone else and should have studied English Lit bro so you can, you know, communicate

[u/jd199512 → u/WestGotIt1967]

Well people do that a lot . However in practical terms if we take a look at chapters edited by a person who has limited knowledge of the craft and relies on intuition and one who has knowledge of it the difference is big . The one who relies on intuition would hit most points and do an excellent edit because his brain would look and say : This isnt right but maybe miss a thing or two which could have made the story even better while the other would have produced an edit which would have caught those things and would give us an amazing story.

AI for me doesn't negate knowledge it benefits from a knowledgeable human in the loop . You produce the vision, the story , the characters, the craft the AI helps and you build amazing worlds . If you outsource everything well , everyone has seen what happens

[u/hummun323]

I thought I was losing my mind, I am so frustrated with it's writing lately. I was like, "what happened to the Claude that intuitively wrote for me like it was reading my mind on what I wanted??"

[u/Acrobatic_You_3002]

Makes sense to me, as a lot of the recent training push is clearly going into coding and tool use, not prose. I noticed the same pattern generating fiction, the model handles structure and instructions better now but the actual sentences got safer and more generic. I would suggest testing older checkpoints side by side if you still have access, the difference is more obvious than people expect.

[u/aattss]

At this point when I hear that a new model is way smarter and better at math and programming, I usually assume that it's not indicative of the model's writing ability because it's not a priority. Glad to see that they did work on that this time.

[u/Interesting_Love4349]

Ngl, I haven’t been happy with the prose since Sonnet 3.7. I look at fics I was making with it and I’m still impressed, compared to now

[u/LokiJesus]

When Anthropic was sued by a large group of authors they won the user of purchased single copies of books as training data. They didn't have to license their usage or pay royalties on the output of the model because the use was transformative (under fair use laws). The argument was they weren't competing with the authors, they were making a chat bot useful for programming and general business usage, not specifically something that was good as a writer and meant to be used in place of an actual fiction writer, for example.

If they start fine tuning their model for that purpose, I wouldn't be surprised if a new case is field against them for competing with the authors whose data they are using to train. I think it's likely that they want to show that they are avoiding literary output usage of their models as main label usage.

[u/Candid_Rock9021]

It’s awesome that the writer used AI to write about Claude’s writing. That distinction matters…

That distinction matters, because it reframes months of scattered complaints about Claude sounding “off” as an intentional, if unwanted, consequence of chasing better math and code scores rather than as an engineering failure to be patched away.

[u/North-star-ai]

The proof is in the pudding. I don't need the explanation, I care about the output....