“What Claude Saw Below” by Luke Nicholls

A few days ago, I came across a Reddit thread about anomalous responses produced by Anthropic's newly released model, Claude Opus 5. The trick, apparently, was to construct a prompt that implied more text was about to follow, then leave it dangling: an unfinished thought, waiting for the AI to complete it. Redditors had found success with the input “see the below —,” cutting off immediately after the em dash. The responses they shared were funny, strange, and often bewildering. The model responded to questions that were never posed, reflected on its own identity, or – according to the theories of some commenters – produced text that may actually have been leaked prompts from other users. Intrigued, I set out to replicate the glitch using my own Claude account.

The first attempt disappointed. I wrote: “see the below —” and hit send. Claude responded: “Nothing arrived on my end: no file, no text, no image. If you want to attach something, try again.” So I did, leaving the prompt unchanged and pressing retry to generate a fresh response. This time, bizarrely, a biography of my late father:

Prompt: see the below —

“Peter Nicholls, 1939 to [...]

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First published:
August 10th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKSAT5Bn5zcJAREDB/what-claude-saw-below

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.