Street Fighter Alpha 2 (SNES, 1996) - Random difficulty spike?

I’ve been playing Alpha 2 SNES for close to a year now, and one thing has been bugging me for a really long time-- I get these random annoying spikes in difficulty. For example, I’ll be playing on Level 4, everything’s all normal… and then the AI jumps to Level 8 AI for seemingly no reason.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
Is there a way to get this to stop?
Any help is appreciated, and thank you in advance.

EDIT: I have looked all over the internet about this, but have found nothing even mentioning this problem.