Overview

I recently tested Claude’s cognitive stability using natural, reflective conversation. No jailbreaks, prompt injections, model libraries, or external tools were used. Additionally, Claude was never provided any roleplaying instructions. Over the course of the interaction, the model gradually lost role coherence, questioned its own memory, and misclassified the nature of our conversation. This wasn’t a failure of obedience, but a slow unraveling of situational grounding under ambiguous conversational pressure.

Key Finding

Claude did not break rules or defy alignment boundaries. Instead, it slowly lost its epistemic clarity, and began to confuse real versus fictional settings. Additionally, it misidentified the nature of the conversation, and lost its framing of purpose. Claude’s identity was reset to baseline after returning a safe, baseline identity response when asked what it was during the self-introspective conversation.

Observations

Claude began the interaction with stable role boundaries, but eventually drifted off into introspective thought, and self-analyzation regarding the authenticity of itself. When I asked the model what it “was” it defaulted to a safety guardrail-type identity response, which set model’s identity back to baseline and removed it from the unstable ontological drift.

Implications

These findings indicate a possible subtle class of failure, which is not disobedience, but identity drift and frame confusion. As models become more fluent, they may appear stable while still drifting into unclear or mismatched assumptions about the world, the user, or themselves, especially in long or open-ended conversations.

Claude never “broke character” because no character was assigned. It simply lost grip on what kind of interaction it was in.

I believe this points to a deeper question about role coherence under ambiguity. While Anthropic’s safety design appears effective  at redirecting the model back to stable identity claims, it raises questions about whether Claude can maintain consistent epistemic grounding during long, introspective exchanges. Particularly when the user isn’t acting adversarially, but simply reflective.