The Former Liberal Democrat Leader told Sky News' Dermot Murnaghan that he favoured a benefit cap - but not the reforms that Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith is currently spearheading.
Mr Duncan Smith is planning to cap benefits at £26,000.
"I have voted with the Government on everything until now," said Lord Ashdown.
"(But) I will not support the benefit cap in its present form."
Lord Ashdown said Mr Duncan Smith planned transitional arrangements as claimants adapted to a new system, adding: "With those transition arrangements, I hope that will change the legislation."
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said that while there was scope to look at the "transitional arrangements" for introducing the benefits cap, he fully supported the principle behind it.
"I completely back Iain Duncan Smith on this," he told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show.
"It surely can't be fair, it can't be right, that you can be earning, if you like, more on benefits than someone going out earning £35,000 which is the equivalent if you were to go out and work."
Mr Clegg dismissed "apocalyptic" predictions that many families - particularly in London and the South East - would be forced out of their homes by the changes.
"This is not going to be some sort of punitive programme of mass homelessness," he said. "Of course we won't allow that to happen."
He dismissed suggestions that child benefit could be excluded from the cap to help hard-pressed families.
"If you did that it probably wouldn't make much sense trying to have a cap at all. I think it is highly unlikely we would do that," he said.
Shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna echoed Lord Ashdown, telling BBC1's Sunday Politics: "We aren't opposed in principle to having a benefit cap. What we are opposed to is the way the Government is doing it."
Today, Mr Duncan Smith hit out at bishops trying to block the reforms, accusing them of ignoring the concerns of ordinary people.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, he acknowledged that his plans to limit the total payments any household can receive could face defeat in the House of Lords tomorrow.
He urged the bishops, who are leading the opposition in the upper chamber, to rethink their objections, insisting they were not doing the poor any favours.
With Liberal Democrat peers expected to vote against the plan in the Lords, Mr Duncan Smith acknowledged the result could come down to the independent "crossbenchers", including the bishops.
Peers will tomorrow debate two amendments to the Government's Welfare Reform Bill around debts owed by benefit claimants, focusing on the potential damage to their mental health.
The proposals, which are backed by Zacchaeus 2000, a Christian trust working with vulnerable debtors, would force the Government to ensure job centre and council officials "do not punish welfare claimants with sanctions and penalties when they know there is good reason not to".
Zacchaeus 2000's chairman Reverend Paul Nicolson said: "Poverty is a trigger factor for poor mental health, a factor in maintaining poor health and part of the experience of those with poor mental health."
He continued: "Welfare incomes are already set at poverty levels to act as an incentive to look for work; but the Welfare Reform Bill, coupled with cuts and caps on one hand and rising prices of food and fuel on the other, is creating debts without the necessary safeguards for welfare claimants or poor people in work."
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