Anthropic's Claude Is Good at Poetry—and Bullshitting

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei takes part in a session on AI during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos.Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Photograph: FABRICE COFFRINI/Getty Images

The researchers of Anthropic’s interpretability group know that Claude, the company’s large language model, is not a human being, or even a conscious piece of software. Still, it’s very hard for them to talk about Claude, and advanced LLMs in general, without tumbling down an anthropomorphic sinkhole. Between cautions that a set of digital operations is in no way the same as a cogitating human being, they often talk about what’s going on inside Claude’s head. It’s literally their job to find out. The papers they publish describe behaviors that inevitably court comparisons with real-life organisms. The title of one of the two papers the team released this week says it out loud: “On the ...