Opus 5 quietly widens task scope — Anthropic ships a paste-in block to stop it

Claude Platform Docs·medium signal

Separate from verbosity, Anthropic documents that Opus 5 "can expand the scope of a task, adding steps that weren't requested or applying its own judgment about what the task should be," and publishes an exact constraint block for narrow work: deliver what was asked at the scope intended, make routine judgment calls yourself, check in only when different readings lead to materially different work, and if the request seems mistaken say so in a sentence and continue rather than "quietly narrowing, widening, or transforming it." This is the counterweight to the 80%-system-prompt-deletion advice — you delete the old behavioral guardrails, but scope discipline is one of the few things still worth spending tokens on.