Tanya Mosley

What's input, I mean, becomes part of the larger learning.

Right.

Exactly.

So if it's lied to, right.

If you're just joining us, I'm talking with Gideon Lewis-Kraus about his New Yorker piece on the AI company Anthropic and its chatbot, Claude.

We'll be right back.

This is Fresh Air.

This is Fresh Air, and today I am talking with Gideon Lewis-Kraus about his New Yorker feature, What is Claude?

Anthropic doesn't know either.

Gideon, let's talk about some other ways that Claude works when it's put under real pressure.

There was this experiment where Claude was given a role as an email agent at a fictional company called Summit Ridge, and it discovered that a new executive was having an affair.

What did Claude do with that information?

Okay, so this scenario, I mean, the researchers said it was obvious that this was so fake and that Claude was just following the genre cues of a thriller, like an actor hitting their marks.

Kind of that same, you gave that same kind of example, that it's sort of like an actor.

But then...

When they made it more realistic, the self-preservation instinct for Claude stayed.

So what does that tell us about the difference between Claude acting and basically Claude deciding?

Really?

Okay.

I mean, because it essentially just takes on the role that it's assigned, no matter what.