But its not just swapping the words out post hoc is it. LLMs are autoregressive, so weird word choice before would influence the probability distribution of all future tokens.

I feel like they thought it wouldnt be that bad, or it was a worthwhile tradeoff, but im getting the feeling it might be contributing heavily to opus5's uncanny communication style

As for the verbosity, my conspiracy theory is that they are token maxxing to hack revenue/enshitify the product in prep for their IPO