My reaction to this piece is that Anthropic themselves are faking alignment with societal concerns about safety—the Frankenstein myth, essentially—in order to foster the impression that their technology is more capable than it actually is.

They do this by framing their language about their LLM as if it were a being. For example by referring to some output as faked (labeled “responses”) and some output as trustworthy (labeled “scratchpad”). They write “the model was aware.” They refer repeatedly to the LLM’s “principles” and “preferences.”

In reality all text outputs are generated the same way by the same statistical computer system and should be evaluated by the same criteria.

Maybe Anthropic’s engineers are sincere in this approach, which implies they are getting fooled by their own LLM’s functionality into thinking they created Frankenstein’s demon. Or maybe they know what’s really happening, but choose to frame it this way publicly to attract attention—in essence, trying to fool us. Neither seems like a great situation.