Giving this a reread with fresh eyes this morning, I realized I wasn't explicit enough in saying that I see that this fix is about the same as the one you mentioned, Karthikeyan, but said you were concerned might cause more subtle bugs. I hear that, and will try some more specific fixes, I was just trying to gather whether the tests showing 

self.assertEqual(call(ANY).call_list(), mock.mock_calls)
self.assertEqual(mock.mock_calls, call(ANY).call_list())

results in one passing and the other not (and the same for calls) changed the math on how brittle the current logic is, so just leaving it seemed like less of an option. I'll keep working on some other ideas though, whether we can check for ANY directly, or just wrap the BoundArguments that are causing problems when the mock has spec set.