Tanya Mosley

Our guest today is New Yorker staff writer Gideon Lewis Krauss.

We'll be right back after a short break.

I'm Tanya Moseley, and this is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Gideon Lewis-Kraus, a staff writer at The New Yorker.

His latest piece explores Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude.

He is the author of A Sense of Direction, Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, and the Kindle single No Exit about tech startups.

He teaches reporting at the Graduate Writing Program at Columbia University.

Our interview was recorded yesterday.

I want to get to some of what you discovered that actually keeps researchers up at night.

Some of them are essentially trying to do neuroscience on an AI.

Is that like a correct description when I say that?

That is a correct description.

Okay.

So there's this remarkable internal tool called What Is Claude Thinking?

Tell us about it.

Tell us about particularly this banana experiment that they did.

Right.

So what does it mean to say an AI is aware of something?

That actually brings more human attributes to it, that it's conscious of itself.