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Episode 49 · Monday, 7 September 2026 · 90 min

Opus 5 Is The First Model That Gets Worse With Use

Thumbnail for the episode Opus 5 Is The First Model That Gets Worse With Use
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Join the Clarity open source harness waitlist: https://heyclarity.dev/

A developer said the only way he got Opus 5 to be concise was by cancelling his subscription, and the post pulled 2,100 likes. The problem at Anthropic right now isn’t the benchmark scores, it’s that the model argues with you instead of doing the work.

I sat down with my co-founder Jonathan on the Opus 5 trust wobble, the week where the model quality and the CEO’s public messaging started failing in the exact same way. Dario’s first tweets on X and the ownership he won’t take, the GitHub issue where Opus 5 gated all work behind four questions, the Anthropic red team paper where 18 of 30 agents created the identical git branch, Ox Alpha beating Fable 5 by 15 points while burning three times fewer tokens, and a live demo of the Clarity open source harness.

If you’re an AI builder or a tech exec routing production work through a model you can’t predict, you need to watch this.

Hosted by Robert Ta and Jonathan McCoy, co-founders of Clarity, reporting from the front lines of building an AI company.

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