Anecdotal, but most of the accounts I’d been looking at from the 4o era moved to Claude. I haven’t seen the really wacky ones with the posts full of unicode, but the “my chunibyo cliche AI character is genuinely, seriously my real life significant other” people seemed to switch providers to Anthropic and not miss a beat. Whatever one might think of Anthropic’s policy on not declaring explicitly that their model isn’t sapient, it certainly helped this crowd make a decision.
I should note that 4o still exists through the API and any number of mirror sites. It turns out that the AI psychosis people were few in number and low in tech savvy, to the point where just switching to the API presented a prohibitive challenge. I’m frankly a bit surprised that none of them thought to ask another LLM whether they could get 4o back, given that they’d definitely be directed to one of these solutions and then live happily ever after.
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.
Anecdotal, but most of the accounts I’d been looking at from the 4o era moved to Claude. I haven’t seen the really wacky ones with the posts full of unicode, but the “my chunibyo cliche AI character is genuinely, seriously my real life significant other” people seemed to switch providers to Anthropic and not miss a beat. Whatever one might think of Anthropic’s policy on not declaring explicitly that their model isn’t sapient, it certainly helped this crowd make a decision.
I should note that 4o still exists through the API and any number of mirror sites. It turns out that the AI psychosis people were few in number and low in tech savvy, to the point where just switching to the API presented a prohibitive challenge. I’m frankly a bit surprised that none of them thought to ask another LLM whether they could get 4o back, given that they’d definitely be directed to one of these solutions and then live happily ever after.
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.