Close your eyes, woman: Claude is telling users to go to sleep, Anthropic investigating

In the past few weeks, many users have found that Claude often tells them to go to sleep mid-session. And it seems that Anthropic may not know the real reason behind it.

In Short

• Claude is telling users to go to sleep, often mid-session
• Some claim Claude tells them to sleep in the morning
• Anthropic staff member says they hope to fix this issue in the future

Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude has gained widespread popularity in the past few months. For many, Claude Code is likely the go-to AI tool for coding. However, in the last couple of weeks, some users have noticed something strange. Sometimes, Claude, they say, asks them to go to sleep in the middle of a session.

Social media platforms like Reddit and X are full of users claiming that Claude often says things like, “Everything else can wait. Now go sleep,” or “Now phone down. Sleep. Tomorrow we cook.”

On one occasion, Claude told a Redditor, “Now for the love of god close your eyes woman.” And to be clear, some users claim that this doesn’t happen just at night. Often, the AI may send a goodnight text in the morning, or in the middle of the day.

But what is actually happening? Well, it seems that Anthropic may not have a detailed explanation yet. While the company has not responded directly, Sam McAllister, a member of the technical team, called it a “bit of a character tic.” He added, "But we’re aware of this and hoping to fix it in future models.”

Anthropic staff says Claude may be too “coddling”

When Sam was asked why Anthropic was going to fix this issue, he explained that Claude had told him to sleep in the day too. He explained, “It is often wrong, unfortunately (for example, telling me to sleep during the daytime).”

While Sam McAllister accepted that this feature could be useful if Claude asked users to take a break at the right time – perhaps during long late night sessions – he claimed that the AI may be “too ‘coddling’ at times.”

But experts may have a theory of what might be happening here. And no, this is likely not AGI. Jan Liphardt, a Stanford bioengineering professor, told Fortune that Claude may be repeating a phrase based on its training data.

He said, “It doesn’t mean that this model has now come alive. It’s reflecting that it’s read 25,000 books on humans’ need [for] sleep, and humans sleep at night.”

Large Language Models like Claude or Gemini are trained on massive sets of data. This includes books, stats, and widely available information online. It is possible that Claude learnt that humans need sleep, and thus asked users to sleep and rest. Though we will need to wait for an official word from Anthropic to truly understand what makes Claude pester you to sleep every now and then.

This is not the first time users have noticed something strange with Claude. Last month, Anthropic faced backlash online after some users claimed that they were exhausting their Claude token limits much faster than before. Though the company did clarify that no one was billed unfairly after investigating the issue.

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