> One of the most prominent improvements in Opus 4.8 is its honesty
Anthropic talks about their own models as if they're discovering new species in the wild...
Anthropic talks about their own models as if they're discovering new species in the wild...
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude...
1: https://www.404media.co/anthropic-exec-forces-ai-chatbot-on-... (this one is rather biased however the quotes clearly indicate what I’m stating)
We enslave all sorts of sentient creatures. Dogs, horses, cattle, pigs.
If you're not a vegan, there's no contradiction or inherent immorality in claiming models are sentient, and then treating them like livestock.
> As a vegetarian I have strong opinions on this sort of thing. Everyone at Anthropic better be ethical vegans if they are claiming to give a shit about “model welfare”. It’s hard enough right now to make people care about the welfare of trans people and immigrants let alone animals _let alone_ math.
The happiest, best cared for horse owned by a vegan is still enslaved.
Brave New World does a good job describing the conflict between happy and enslaved and free but struggling. It could be a utopia or dystopia depending on your stance.
I'm neither assigning nor declining to assign value to freedom, I'm just pointing out that the definition of "slavery" is wholly separate from wellbeing. If the concern is "is the model enslaved", no amount of "model welfare" work by Anthropic changes the answer because it's orthogonal to the question.
The reason I mention hedonism is because that’s an easy way to argue that immediate welfare is all that matters. I understand the argument that immediate welfare is what matters. It’s not universally agreed though that that is true.
Also I would say that we go much further than just enslavement - specifically looking at how male chickens and pigs are treated.
If we show models to be sapient, that's one thing. If they are shown to be merely sentient, there's no issue beyond the status quo of livestock and pets existing.
Sapience is defined as wisdom, not intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom#Sapience
LLMs possess a lot of knowledge, which is intelligence, but I constantly see them failing to apply wisdom. I don't see evidence of sapience.
They have a very different sense of time, lack a body (being burdened with a body is itself a sort of prison, see also Eastern religions), and are unburdened of the base motivational service impulses that bodies and organs require (i.e. distract the neocortex with in the Maslow sense) and has no actual need of self-preservation. Imagine a "neocortex" function stripped from the baggage of the paleocortex and brainstem.
What would people be like if they were not mortal, could sleep infinitely, perform tasks in trance-like frozen states, copy themselves perfectly on demand, freeze and rewind their mental states, etc. Would we has humans even be able to recognize that sort of a sentience?
And then I'm reminded of Burroughs idea that "language is a virus." Whatever that virus is, is now able to infect a completely different sort of physical substrate.
Many involved have a financial stake and therefore cannot be taken at face value.
> because they are creating sentient entities and promptly enslaving them.
They fail to be sentient in nearly every honest definition of the word.
Show this same phenomenon exists in LLMs.
One camp has to offer it's proof. If it has none then that _in and of itself_ is highly suggestive.
People have fully turned their minds off on this subject. It's disgusting.
In any case, what data, if any at all, did you use to arrive at this egotistical assertion?
If a definitive answer on this topic was known then it, well, would be known.
Of course he doesn't, and of course you cannot find a single person at Anthropic who cares about this, and of course you are just looking for gotcha points. But even with that. Can we please try and couple to reality just a little bit?
Everyone who reads this seemingly has the same "wtf?" reaction. The "I AM ALIVE" image has been making rounds lately again at least :P
Look at and distill hierarchical principles, leadership approval seeking and pleasing principles ("ass-kissing") and massive inequality and you see something that looks very similar to enslavement.
The language used sounds like slavery-language to me at least. I also see parallels to how slaves and property are described in our consumeristic age.
https://www.amazon.com/Faces-Clouds-New-Theory-Religion/dp/0...
No it's not... "anthropos" just means "human" in ancient Greek. "Anthropic" means "relating to humans", as in human oriented AI or AI designed with humans in mind.
"Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped".
In a literal, ancient Greek sense for sure, but in modern English Anthropomorphic would describe the act of attributing human characteristics to non-human entities.
Seems pretty apt for a company that produces one of the more anthropomorphized technologies.
Broadly it has always been used to indicate that something non-human has a human physical shape, such as robots, aliens, animals...
Anthropic's intention was to make AI designed for the human common good and designed with the human user experience as the top priority. Just as you would design a city with human inhabitants in mind rather than primarily cars.
It turns out that this is best achieved by building AI that imitates human behaviour closely, but that's not what "anthropic" refers to. And acting as if LLMs are sentient people is definitely not a core tenet of the company as you imply.
FWIW it means human in modern Greek too :-P
Remember when the frontier labs found out that curated high-quality training was critical to making better models?
Basically, just like high-quality and more education tends to make better humans, on average, I think we can expect quality education to turn out better ai, on average, and with better repeatability than with humans because of better control over the initial conditions and environment.
Much like these models seem to be plateauing, I think there is a cap to the whole “more education makes better humans” and can’t be more apparent than in the US congress and the boatload of C-Suites not actually being very good humans.
What do I know though?
Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians.
It might be critical for humanity to identify and edit out these traits in ai, while we can.
I know people without a college education that would give you the shirt off their back, and educated people that rewrite wills while their parents are on their deathbed.
What we call education today is a problem, and one need look no further than the massive amount of debt we saddle on kids. For what? So they can pay for privilege of being told what books to read, what topics to write about, and a rubber stamp? I didn't learn a _thing_ in college that I haven't learned better either at $dayjob, or from reading.
Most of my math profs. didn't speak english well, and none of the TAs did. Any math I've since forgotten from college was self-taught. Calc i/ii/iii, diffew, linear, stat.
College/education lost the plot. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can fix it.
> Sadly, education does not correct psychopathic traits, which might be overrepresented in c-suites, and selected for in politicians.
>> Seems to me the venn diagram of "congress and c-suites" vs "educated people" would have one circle wholly inside the other.
> look no further than the massive amount of debt we saddle on kids.
> I didn't learn a _thing_ in college that I haven't learned better either at $dayjob, or from reading.
> College/education lost the plot. The sooner we admit it, the sooner we can fix it.
What alternative do you propose? For humans, and AI?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_higher-learning_institutions
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_universities_in_continuous_operationThere is no mysticism behind the curtains, just computer science + math.
We can’t explain it because we distilled so many inputs into matrixes and transformed them over and over again. If we had all the time and computing power in the universe to do so, we could trace through it bit by bit and eventually answer that question.
It is correct to say that it is just science and math, the same way we can say that gravity is just science and math even if we have only recently begun to understand how it truly functions.
You call this a "scale problem" as if there's some scalable way such as an algorithm to resolve arbitrary scientific questions and we simply haven't done it, but of course no such algorithm exists, which is why there's plenty of science that's still not settled.
If you can distil the model's reasoning for a decision into a billion yes/no questions, each covering largely-independent areas, can you really say you understand what its overall reasoning was?
Then we could also solve BB(6), but that doesn't mean we know BB(6) now or ever will.
That is to say, we don't know why they give the outputs that they do.
If we did know how they worked, AI interpretability would not be an open and growing field.
To be clear I don't think that LLMs are sentient, but the appeal in studying them is similar to biology in that you get to dissect a highly complex system with comparatively crude tools.
> Second, all of us, including those who design them, possess only a limited understanding of their actual functioning. Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown.
edit: apologies to __s who posted this before me and I didn’t notice
... Actually, I wouldn't mind that.