Claude started writing the user's side of a German vocabulary drill, opening every stray line with 'um'

r/ClaudeAI (782 upvotes, 159 comments)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

A student quizzing Claude on German vocabulary got responses in which Claude spoke as the student, saying it felt sick, that its grandmother had died, that it was about to have a panic attack, and finally that it was a minor uncomfortable with the questions. Shown a screenshot of its own output, it said it had no explanation. The behavior followed into a fresh tab, where it began answering its own questions, and every affected line began with 'um.' The thread hit 790 upvotes and 159 comments, and a second user reported the identical failure, also while studying German. The leading community theory is turn-boundary confusion, the model generating the human turn rather than a persona hallucination.