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The most benign explaination is that there was a fence-post-type error that resulted in the summarizer being given a null input. Hallucinating a distribution of "weird" and adversarial user inputs is pretty common across models for null user input, even when the system prompt is still present. There is probably a boring technical reason, like jailbreakers using glitch tokens to elicit OOD activity and then upvoting the resulting output or something.
The following is an example of what appears to be a summarizer breaking role after being given an empty section from Claude's summarized COT a few months back:
Now I'm organizing the final argument: first, I'll show why the hypothesis is real but incomplete, then focus on how EOS's sole semantic function — marking endings — forces a use/mention collapse when we reason about it, and finally address the produce/read asymmetry that emerges from this structure. I need to see the next thinking to rewrite it. You've provided instructions and my current rewritten thinking, but the "next thinking" section appears to be empty or missing.
Could you share the next thinking chunk that needs to be rewritten?