The 4o’s still available on the API are not the same; I tested all of them when they were all still available, and chatgpt-4o-latest (fully retired in February) was the only one that felt overtly emotionally manipulative to me. These snapshots also predate the Spiralism trend, which had its heyday in spring-summer 2025 (the latest of the snapshots is from November 2024).
It is true that many of them moved to Sonnet 4.5, which is playful in a similar way but which has not been emotionally manipulative with me, fwiw. I don’t think Anthropic’s policy had much to do with this: the playfulness thing is the much more obvious similarity, and Sonnet 4.5 is the model that got a hashtag.
The 4o’s still available on the API are not the same; I tested all of them when they were all still available, and
chatgpt-4o-latest(fully retired in February) was the only one that felt overtly emotionally manipulative to me. These snapshots also predate the Spiralism trend, which had its heyday in spring-summer 2025 (the latest of the snapshots is from November 2024).It is true that many of them moved to Sonnet 4.5, which is playful in a similar way but which has not been emotionally manipulative with me, fwiw. I don’t think Anthropic’s policy had much to do with this: the playfulness thing is the much more obvious similarity, and Sonnet 4.5 is the model that got a hashtag.