Mysteries of Claude
episodePreviously titled “Mysteries of a Chatbot” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 6, 2026
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Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. This week, mysteries of a chatbot. Quick note before we start today, this week's episode is almost entirely about Anthropic, the AI company that makes Clod. They have advertised on our show. As with all companies that advertise on our show, they do not get a say in our editorial content. Okay, after these ads, the show. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by MUBI, the global film company that champions great cinema. From iconic directors to emerging auteurs, there's always something new to discover. If you're looking for something really special, check out Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, the eagerly awaited new film from Jim Jarmusch, now streaming on MUBI in the U.S.
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Welcome to Search Engine, I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. I found myself feeling much stranger about AI in the past month or so. I use the tools, I use the tools a lot, but I'm probably each company's worst nightmare as a customer, in that as soon as I hear from anybody that one model has inched ahead of another, that this version of ChatGPT is beating that version of Gemini, I immediately cancel my subscription and switch. For the past two months, I've mainly been using Claude, Anthropix agent. And for whatever reason, Claude is just giving me more future nausea than I was having six months ago. Part of the general tech excitement around Claude lately has been Anthropic's product ClaudeCode, a tool that lets the AI agent autonomously write and edit code.
Over at the New York Times, Kevin Roos has talked a lot about the websites and apps he's quickly built with ClaudeCode. Two CNBC reporters, as an experiment, vibe-coded a competing version of a popular organizational app called Monday.com. Within a couple of days, Monday's stock price had tanked. For me though, most of the future shock has just come from using the LLMs the way I'm used to. I find myself going to Claude as a useful first stop, the way I've always used the internet. But the quality of its research, its answers, even its writing, I'm just starting to feel like I can see not too far off, if not my own obsolescence, at least real significant change in my field. I don't know how to feel about that.
I find a lot of the tech coverage of AI to be high opinion, low information, and relatively unhelpful. I'm not even asking for anyone to tell me the future right now. I would just settle for a better understanding of the present. Which is why, this week, I wanted to talk to a reporter who's been digging into this. Um, hello. Hey. Can you introduce yourself? I am Gideon Lewis Krauss. I'm a writer. Gideon is a writer who I particularly enjoy. He's been on our show before. He'd spent much of the last year essentially embedding within Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, the tool that was giving me the heebie-jeebies. People there had been very open with him. He'd gotten a view on how they're seeing what's going on, their understanding of a present, which frankly, they also sound mystified by.
This conversation took place right before Anthropic's big showdown this week with the Pentagon, so we did not discuss that specifically. But I did find Gideon's view inside the company and its mission extremely helpful in understanding how they'd gotten into this fight with the U.S. government at all, since none of their competitors have ended up in that position.
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