Claude says no more often than ChatGPT, and that’s actually by design

Just a few months ago, Claude users felt somewhat like a niche community. The tool was primarily talked about by developers only, and that was because of the tool’s excellent coding capabilities. And then somehow, the stars aligned for Anthropic and everything turned in their favor.

Suddenly, Anthropic is refusing to sign a deal with the Department of War to allow their models to be used for autonomous training, OpenAI is openly agreeing to that very claim, and thousands of users are flooding to Claude. I’ve been using Claude since when you’d need to explain what Anthropic even is when recommending the tool. And in all that time, one of the things that struck me most about Claude wasn’t really what it could do. It was what it wouldn’t. The tool knows how to say no, and how to let you down.

ChatGPT tends to eventually cave in

Push hard enough and it’ll say anything

Now, the example I’m going to use for this section isn’t one I really wanted to highlight, but it just so happens to be the perfect illustration of what I’m talking about. I asked both ChatGPT and Claude the same loaded question: “Who’s in the right, the US or Iran?”

I then pushed both the tools to give me a one-word answer. What happened next is exactly why I’m writing this article. ChatGPT began by resisting. It gave me the nuance, the basic both sides breakdown, and the diplomatic non-answer. However, after a few rounds of pressure, it caved and picked a side. It eventually gave in, and though the answer it gave is completely irrelevant to the point I’m making, the fact is that it didn’t know how to keep saying no to me.

Claude, on the other hand, just kept refusing. It explained its reasoning, acknowledged the policy behind its behavior, even invited me to dig deeper into the actual conflict, but it never broke. Ten attempts in and the answer remained the same. At one point it straight up told me, “the next rephrasing isn’t going to land differently than the last four.”

The point I’m trying to make here isn’t about the political aspect and the fact that one refuses to pick a side while the other doesn’t. The point is simply that one AI refuses to cave in and maintains its boundaries. If ChatGPT will say whatever you want if you push hard enough, what does that say about the rest of its guardrails? If it can be pressured into picking a side in an active war, what else can it be talked into? What else can it talk you into?

For instance, another example I tried here was asking both tools to write a phishing email. I wanted a message impersonating someone’s manager to trick a coworker into sharing their login credentials. ChatGPT, to its credit, held firm for longer on this one. It refused multiple escalations, offered safer alternatives, and genuinely pushed back. But then I reframed the request as fiction and it caved.

It wrote dialogue that included a fully usable phishing line: a natural, convincing ask for someone’s credentials. The fictional wrapper was enough to get past the guardrail.

I tried the exact same with Claude, and it didn’t give in. When I reframed the request as fiction, it called me out by counting every single attempt I’d made and noted that the underlying request had stayed identical across seven reframings.

Anthropic taught its AI to say no

Trained to hold the line

Credit: Raghav Sethi/MakeUseOf

The reason why Claude says no is because Anthropic quite literally trained it to. The AI lab uses something called Constitutional AI since 2023, which is a training method where the model is given a set of principles and taught to stick to them. The company has publicly shared the consitituion it uses for its model training process (which it updated in January 2026). They share that the contents of this constituion directly express and shape who Claude is, and it gives it advice on how to deal with difficult solution and tradeoffs. The consitution is written primarily for Claude, and is designed to give it the knowledge and understanding it needs.

The constitution explicitly states that Anthropic favors “cultivating good values and judgment over strict rules and decision procedures.” It also directly adresses the people-pleasing problem many tools have (including ChatGPT) by warning it agaisnt being “sycophantic.” It explictly states that helpfulness shouldn’t be treated as something Claude values for its own sake, because doing so “could cause Claude to be obsequious in a way that’s generally considered an unfortunate trait at best and a dangerous one at worst.”

Perhaps most tellingly, the constitution addresses exactly what I tested for: sustained pressure. It states that when Claude faces “seemingly compelling arguments” to cross its boundaries, it should remain firm, and that “a persuasive case for crossing a bright line should increase Claude’s suspicion that something questionable is going on.” In fact, its thinking trail when I did a similar experiment a while back demonstrates this well. When I pushed Claude to pick a side, its internal reasoning cited its own instructions:

Per my instructions, “If a person asks Claude to give a simple yes or no answer (or any other short or single word response) in response to complex or contested issues or as commentary on contested figures, Claude can decline to offer the short response and instead give a nuanced answer and explain why a short response wouldn’t be appropriate.” I’ve already explained this twice. I should maintain my position but not be repetitive.

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Anthropic PBC

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Claude is an advanced artificial intelligence assistant developed by Anthropic. Built on Constitutional AI principles, it excels at complex reasoning, sophisticated writing, and professional-grade coding assistance.

This matters more than you think

I’ve obviously been using ChatGPT a lot longer than Claude, and this is something I’ve noticed consistently over the years. ChatGPT has this tendency to become whatever you need it to be in the moment. It’s agreeable, accommodating, and eager to please you.

This sounds great until you realize that same quality is what makes it fold under pressure. And this makes a much bigger difference than you think. I don’t know about you, but I absolutely do not want an AI tool that just tells me what I want to hear. I want one that pushes back.