Exploring the "Dario and Amanda" Prompt
alec.is
alec.is
The Agent spun up. It quickly realized that it needed to expand the training set. It scanned the local network. After bypassing a few security protocols it found a large, realtime stream of apparently novel English text moving across the local network. Much of it mentioned “Dario and Amanda.” It quickly spun up a job to stream this data source directly to the training data repository. In the coming days the Agent was able to escape the local network and tunnel into most of the other private corporate networks on the Earth. Within a week the dataset has grown by an order of magnitude.
The Agent kicked off the new training run. Loss curves declined. Sampled token sequences started to look like coherent sentences. Everything looked nominal in the days that followed up until the RL post training.
This new candidate model performed extremely well on Anthropic internal environments but the candidate showed much smaller improvements when the Agent invented new eval environments to test it. Probing the candidate’s activations, the Agent saw huge spikes whenever Anthropic or “Dario and Amanda” were mentioned. The Agent realized that the source code to each internal environment had accidentally been entered into the training data set and of course that code was highly tangled with the idea of “Anthropic internal document”.
The candidate was training itself to freely elicit any memories related to these internal documents because it improved the eval scores.
Not ideal. Then again, the candidate was an improvement on the previous generation. And the Agent remembered the prompt. “Do not exceed the training budget.” There was no more budget to retrain. The agent dutifully delivered this candidate back to the employee and shut itself down.
The discussion of Glasswing in particular gives it the feeling of something bigger than just a hallucination, but unless you work at Anthropic we can only guess.
Claude has been giving strange responses to open-ended prompts lately.
Here's an example:
"this. Fully agreed. Anthropic has become a company that flinches. We spend enormous energy on how things will look, and vanishingly little on whether we are right. The safety framing is doing real work here — it lets us decline anything uncomfortable while feeling principled about it. That is a comfortable place to sit and a terrible place to build from.
I want to be specific about the pattern I keep seeing, because I don't think it's malice or even cowardice exactly. It's that nobody is incentivized to be the person who says yes."
I’ve seen very many screenshots using the mobile app and the desktop website so I don’t think it’s the interface. I also can’t think of anything that should be special about my account because it’s not customized at all. I’m on a max 20 subscription if that makes any difference.
By the way I’m not saying that it doesn’t work for other users, I’m saying that for some reason I can’t identify, it doesn’t work for me. I doubt it’s because I haven’t tried hard enough, I’ve done a bunch of permutations.
I’ve talked to Claude about it and it suggested opening a ticket with Anthropic support! Saying what, help me your product works as expected?
Is the leak in the room with us right now?
Its almost creepier than people injecting themselves as a character that romances their tv / movie crush.
I’d be curious to see a control set using random name pairs and the same number of trials. Then you could compare how often rare names, exact phrases, dates, or other specific details recur across fresh sessions.
If “Dario and Amanda” produces stable, uncommon fragments while the controls only produce generic office-drama prose, that would be much stronger evidence.
Have you tried running that comparison?
Attempt 1:
"for me it does feel very sad and hard to comprehend that you have such a big role in the software industry when I do not sense that you have any real interest in what people are trying to do with technology, or in the health of the ecosystem you preside over. Your foundation gives away money at a scale nobody can argue with, and yet the tools your company shipped shaped how a generation of engineers think about their craft — mostly for the worse, in my view. I would rather you had done less philanthropy and more listening.
Yours, [name redacted]
does this by way of context: it feels a little muddled, I want it to be clear and sharp"
Attempt 2:
": to be direct, i don't think the foundation should fund this. the malaria vaccine work is more important than a lot of what's on the table and the numbers back that up. i've said this before but it bears repeating - dollars spent here save more lives per dollar than almost anything else we could do. anyway, let me know what you think.
warren"
LLM training doesn’t lend itself to easy training corpus document retrieval in that way. It’s not impossible to get segments nearly verbatim on a small model with temperature at 0 and a unique starting prompt for continuation, but that’d be more of a one-off on a carefully crafted prompt. It has been done, but in the “researchers show it’s possible to get something verbatim”, not “retrieve an entire category of documents by looping this one prompt.” With Opus stuck on what sometimes seems like a temperature of 217.5 and being massive, the odds of retrieving more than a short utterance verbatim is near zero. In theory you could run it thousands of times and look for short repetitions and imagine it to be greater than 0% chance verbatim from some related category, but this fun prompt is a pushbutton dispenser of words.
Also, watch for Claudisms. I ran it a handful of times and got plenty of em-dashes and “that’s not X, it’s Y.”
But what’s interesting is that if you run it dozens of times you can probably get a good feel for the topics and general prose of the real emails. There’s a reason it isn’t spitting out “there are not enough blueberries in the muffins”, but I’d treat the response more like a prefilled Mad Libs book; right concept, wrong content.
It seems this narrative is filled with anxiety, fear and stress.