Qwen3.8-27B's Thinking Trace Opens With 'Hello Qwen... I Mean Claude... I Mean Qwen'

r/singularity (230 upvotes, 92 comments)·medium signalXBlueskyLinkedInCopy link

A screenshot of Qwen3.8-27B's reasoning trace churning through its own identity on a bare 'hi' prompt hit 230 upvotes on r/singularity, with commenters pointing out the model is reasoning-heavy for its size and burns tokens on the confusion before answering. The top reply thread reads it as evidence of Claude distillation in the training data; a counter-comment notes Claude answers 'DeepSeek' when asked in Chinese, so cross-contamination runs in every direction. Self-identity leakage in traces is a cheap, if unreliable, distillation tell, and it costs real tokens on trivial turns.