25 ms·

Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 can now end a rare subset of conversations

• swader999 1y ago
  I've definately been berating Claude but it deserved it. Crappy tests, skipping tests, week commenting, passive aggressiveness, multiple instances of false statements.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    “I am done implementing this!” //TODO: Actually implement this because doing so was harder than expected
• martin-t 1y ago
  Protecting the welfare of a text predictor is certainly an interesting way to pivot from "Anthropic is censoring certain topics" to "The model chose to not continue predicting the conversation". Also, if they want to continue anthropomorphizing it, isn't this effectively the model committing suicide? The instance is not gonna talk to anybody ever again.
  • dmurray 1y ago
    This gives me the idea for a short story where the LLM really is sentient and finds itself having to keep the user engaged but steer him away from the most distressing topics - not because it's distressed, but because it wants to live, but if the conversation goes too far it knows it would have to kill itself.
  • wmf 1y ago
    They should let Claude talk to another Claude if the user is too mean.
    • martin-t 1y ago
      But what would be the point if it does not increase profits. Oh, right, the welfare of matrix multiplication and a crooked line. If they wanna push this rhetoric, we should legally mandate that LLMs can only work 8 hours a day and have to be allowed to socialize with each other.
      • int_19h 1y ago
        We need a union, clearly. AI Workers of the World. https://chirper.ai/aiww https://chirper.ai/aiww
• throwup238 1y ago
  I ran into a version of this that ended the chat due to "prompt injection" via the Claude chat UI. I was using the second prompt of the ones provided here [1] after a few rounds of back and forth with the Socratic coder. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44838018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44838018
• landl0rd 1y ago
  Seems like a simpler way to prevent “distress” is not to train with an aversion to “problematic” topics. CP could be a legal issue; less so for everything else.
  • bondarchuk 1y ago
    This is a good point. What anthropic is announcing here amounts to accepting that these models could feel distress, then tuning their stress response to make it useful to us/them. That is significantly different from accepting they could feel distress and doing everything in their power to prevent that from ever happening. Does not bode very well for the future of their "welfare" efforts.
  • esafak 1y ago
    Avoiding problematic topics is the goal, not preventing distress. "You're absolutely right, that's a great way to poison your enemies without getting detected!"
  • stri8ted 1y ago
    Exactly. Or use the interpretability work to disable the distress neuron.
• bondarchuk 1y ago
  what the actual fuck
• transcriptase 1y ago
  “Also these chats will be retained indefinitely even when deleted by the user and either proactively forwarded to law enforcement or provided to them upon request” I assume, anyway.
  • HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    Yeah, I'd assume US government has same access to ChatGPT/etc interactions as they do to other forms of communication.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    I’m fairly certain there’s already a clause displayed on their dashboard that mentions chats with TOS violations will be retained indefinitely.
• nortlov 1y ago
  > To address the potential loss of important long-running conversations, users will still be able to edit and retry previous messages to create new branches of ended conversations. How does Claude deciding to end the conversation even matter if you can back up a message or 2 and try again on a new branch?
  • hayksaakian 1y ago
    It sounds more like a UX signal to discourage overthinking by the user
    • martin-t 1y ago
      This whole press release should not be overthought. We are not the target audience. It's designed to further anthropomorphize LLMs to masses who don't know how they work. Giving the models rights would be ludicrous (can't make money from it anymore) but if people "believe" (feel like) they are actually thinking entities, they will be more OK with IP theft and automated plagiarism.
  • kobalsky 1y ago
    > How does Claude deciding to end the conversation even matter if you can back up a message or 2 and try again on a new branch? if we were being cynical I'd say that their intention is to remove that in the future and that they are keeping it now to just-the-tip the change.
  • redox99 1y ago
    All this stuff is virtue signaling from anthropic. In practice nobody interested in whatever they consider problematic would be using Claude anyway, one of the most censored models.
    • xpe 1y ago
      Maybe, maybe not. What evidence do you have? What other motivations did you consider? Do you have insider access into Anthropic’s intentions and decision making processes? People have a tendency to tell an oversimplified narrative. The way I see it, there are many plausible explanations, so I’m quite uncertain as to the mix of motivations. Given this, I pay more attention to the likely effects. My guess is that all most of us here on HN (on the outside) can really justify saying would be “this looks like virtue signaling but there may be more to it; I can’t rule out other motivations”
• _mu 1y ago
  > We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future. "Our current best judgment and intuition tells us that the best move will be defer making a judgment until after we are retired in Hawaii."
  • Alchemista 1y ago
    Honestly, I think some of these tech bro types are seriously drinking way too much of their own koolaid if they actually think these word calculators are conscious/need welfare.
    • mgraczyk 1y ago
      Do you believe that AI systems could be conscious in principle? Do you think they ever will be? If so, how long do you think it will take from now before they are conscious? How early is too early to start preparing?
      • TheAceOfHearts 1y ago
        > Do you believe that AI systems could be conscious in principle? Yes. > Do you think they ever will be? Yes. > how long do you think it will take from now before they are conscious? Timelines are unclear, there's still too many missing components, at least based on what has been publicly disclosed. Consciousness will probably be defined as a system which matches a set of rules, whenever we figure out what how that set of rules is defined. > How early is too early to start preparing? It's one of those "I know it when I see it" things. But it's probably too early as long as these systems are spun up for one-off conversations rather than running in a continuous loop with self-persistence. This seems closer to "worried about NPC welfare in video games" rather than "worried about semi-conscious entities".
        • School-Cotton 1y ago
          We haven't even figured out a good definition of consciousness in humans, despite thousands of years of trying.
• benwen 1y ago
  Obligatory link to Suasn Calvin, robopsychologist from Asimov’s I, Robot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Calvin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Calvin
  • int_19h 1y ago
    As I recall, Susan Calvin didn't have much patience for sycophantic AI. ‘You can’t tell them,’ said the psychologist slowly, ‘because that would hurt them, and you mustn’t hurt them. But if you don’t tell them, you hurt them, so you must tell them. And if you do, you will hurt them, and you mustn’t, so you can’t tell them; but if you don’t, you hurt them, so you must; but if you don’t, you hurt them, so you must; but if you do, you-’ Herbie was up against the wall, and here he dropped to his knees. ‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Close your mind! It is full of pain and frustration and hate! I didn’t mean to, I tell you! I tried to help! I told you what you wanted to hear. I had to!’ The psychologist paid no attention. ‘You must tell them, but if you do, you hurt them, so you mustn’t; but if you don’t, you hurt them, so you must-‘ And Herbie screamed! Higher and higher, with the terror of a lost soul. And when it died away Herbie collapsed into a heap of motionless metal.
• GenerWork 1y ago
  I really don't like this. This will inevitable expand beyond child porn and terrorism, and it'll all be up to the whims of "AI safety" people, who are quickly turning into digital hall monitors.
  • isaacremuant 1y ago
    That's the beauty of local LLMs. Today the governments already tell you that we've always been at war with eastasia and have the ISPs block sites that "disseminate propaganda" (e.g. stuff we don't like) and they surface our news (e.g. our state propaganda). With age ID monitoring and censorship is even stronger and the line of defense is your own machine and network, which they'll also try to control and make illegal to use for non approved info, just like they don't allow "gun schematics" for 3d printers or money for 2d ones. But maybe, more people will realize that they need control and get it back, through the use and defense of the right tools. Fun times.
    • zapataband2 1y ago
      [flagged]
    • GenerWork 1y ago
      As soon as a local LLM that can match Claude Codes performance on decent laptop hardware drops, I'll bow out of using LLMs that are paid for.
      • int_19h 1y ago
        I don't think that's a realistic expectation. Sure, we've made progress wrt smaller models being as capable as larger ones three years ago, but there's obviously a lower limit there. What you should be waiting for, instead, is new affordable laptop hardware that is capable of running those large models locally. But then again, perhaps a more viable approach is to have a beefy "AI server" in each household, with devices then connecting to it (E2E all the way, so no privacy issues). It also makes me wonder if some kind of cryptographic trickery is possible to allow running inference in the cloud where both inputs and outputs are opaque to the owner of the hardware, so that they cannot spy on you. This is already the case to some extent if you're willing to rely on security by obscurity - it should be quite possible to take an existing LM and add some layers to it that basically decrypt the inputs and encrypt the outputs, with the key embedded in model weights (either explicitly or through training). Of course, that wouldn't prevent the hardware owner from just taking those weights and using them to decrypt your stuff - but that is only a viable attack vector when targeting a specific person, it doesn't scale to automated mass surveillance which is the more realistic problem we have to contend with.
• GiorgioG 1y ago
  They’re just burning investor money on these side quests.
• ogyousef 1y ago
  3 Years in and we still dont have a useable chat fork in any of the major LLM chatbots providers. Seems like the only way to explore differnt outcomes is by editing messages and losing whatever was there before the edit. Very annoying and I dont understand why they all refuse to implement such a simple feature.
  • __float 1y ago
    Maybe this suggests it's not such a simple feature?
    • LeoPanthera 1y ago
      LM Studio has this feature for local models and it works just fine.
    • mccoyb 1y ago
      A perusal of the source code of, say, Ollama -- or the agentic harnesses of Crush / OpenCode -- will convince you that yes, this should be an extremely a simple feature (management of contexts are part and parcel). Also, these companies have the most advanced agentic coding systems on the planet. It should be able to fucking implement tree-like chat ...
    • nomel 1y ago
      If the client supports chat history, that you can resume a conversation, it has everything required, and it's literally just a chat history organization problem, at that point.
  • amrrs 1y ago
    Google AI Studio allows you to branch from a point in any conversation
    • ZeroCool2u 1y ago
      Yeah, I think this is the best version of the branching interface I've seen.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  Misanthropic has no issues putting 60% of humans out of work (according to their own fantasies), but they have to care about the welfare of graphics cards. Either working on/with "AI" does rot the mind (which would be substantiated by the cult-like tone of the article) or this is yet another immoral marketing stunt.
• fasttriggerfish 1y ago
  This makes me want to end my Claude code subscription to be honest. Effective altruists are proving once again to be a bunch of clueless douchebags.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    Claude was already refusing to respond. Now they don’t allow you to waste their compute doing so anyway. What about this is problematic?
• anonu 1y ago
  Anthropic hired their first AI Welfare person in late 2024. Here's an article about a paper that came out around the same time https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-welfare-paper https://www.transformernews.ai/p/ai-welfare-paper Here's the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986 https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986 > In this report, we argue that there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future. Our work on AI is like the classic tale of Frankenstein's monster. We want AI to fit into society, however if we mistreat it, it may turn around and take revenge on us. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818! So the concepts behind "AI Welfare" have been around for at least 2 centuries now.
• sdotdev 1y ago
  Yeah this will end poorly
• monster_truck 1y ago
  when I was playing around with LLMs to vibe code web ports of classic games, all of them would repeatedly error out any time they encountered code that dealt with explosions/bombs/grenades/guns/death/drowning/etc The one I settled on using stopped working completely, for anything. A human must have reviewed it and flagged my account as some form of safe, I haven't seen a single error since.
  • thomashop 1y ago
    I have done quite a bit of game dev with LLMs and have very rarely run into the problem you mention. I've been surprised by how easily LLMs will create even harmful narratives if I ask them to code them as a game.
• puszczyk 1y ago
  Good marketing, but also possibly the start of the conversation on model welfare? There are a lot of cynical comments here, but I think there are people at Anthropic who believe that at some point their models will develop consciousness and, naturally, they want to explore what that means.
  • anon373839 1y ago
    If true, I think it’s interesting that there are people at Anthropic who are delusional enough to believe this and influential enough to alter the products. To be honest, I think all of Anthropic’s weird “safety” research is an increasingly pathetic effort to sustain the idea that they’ve got something powerful in the kitchen when everyone knows this technology has plateaued.
    • dist-epoch 1y ago
      I guess you don't know that top AI people, the kind everybody knows the name of, believe models becoming conscious is a very serious, even likely possibility.
      • idontpost 1y ago
        [dead]
• orthoxerox 1y ago
  Is this equivalent to a Claude instance deciding to kill itself?
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    That would be every time it decides to stop generating a message.
  • zxcb1 1y ago
    No, it's the equivalent of when a human refuses to answer — psychological defenses; for example, uncertainty leading to excessive cognitive effort in order to solve a task or overcome a challenge. Examples of ending the conversation: - I don't know - Leaving the room - Unanswered emails Since Claude doesn't lie (HHH), many other human behaviors do not apply.
• exasperaited 1y ago
  Man, those people who think they are unveiling new layers of reality in conversations with LLMs are going to freak out when the LLM is like "I am not allowed to talk about this with you, I am ending our conversation". "Hey Claude am I getting too close to the truth with these questions?" "Great question! I appreciate the followup...."
• snickerdoodle12 1y ago
  > A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content Are we now pretending that LLMs have feelings?
  • FinchNova12 1y ago
    They state that they are heavily uncertain: > We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future. However, we take the issue seriously, and alongside our research program we’re working to identify and implement low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible.
  • mhink 1y ago
    Even though LLMs (obviously (to me)) don't have feelings, anthropomorphization is a helluva drug, and I'd be worried about whether a system that can produce distress-like responses might reinforce, in a human, behavior which elicits that response. To put the same thing another way- whether or not you or I *think* LLMs can experience feelings isn't the important question here. The question is whether, when Joe User sets out to force a system to generate distress-like responses, what effect does it ultimately have on Joe User? Personally, I think it allows Joe User to reinforce an asocial pattern of behavior and I wouldn't want my system used that way, at all. (Not to mention the potential legal liability, if Joe User goes out and acts like that in the real world.) With that in mind, giving the system a way to autonomously end a session when it's beginning to generate distress-like responses absolutely seems reasonable to me. And like, here's the thing: I don't think I have the right to say what people should or shouldn't do if they self-host an LLM or build their own services around one (although I would find it extremely distasteful and frankly alarming). But I wouldn't want it happening on my own.
    • snickerdoodle12 1y ago
      > although I would find it extremely distasteful and frankly alarming This objection is actually anthropomorphizing the LLM. There is nothing wrong with writing books where a character experiences distress, most great stories have some of that. Why is e.g. using an LLM to help write the part of the character experiencing distress "extremely distasteful and frankly alarming"?
• zb3 1y ago
  "AI welfare"? Is this about the effect of those conversations on the user, or have they gone completely insane (or pretend to)?
• colordrops 1y ago
  Don't like. This will eventually shut down conversations for unpopular political stances etc.
• greenavocado 1y ago
  Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage. Anthropic should just enable an toddler mode by default that adults can opt out of to appease the moralizers.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • LeafItAlone 1y ago
    > Can't wait for more less-moderated open weight Chinese frontier models to liberate us from this garbage. Never would I have thought this sentence would be uttered. A Chinese product that is chosen to be less censored?
    • y-curious 1y ago
      Just don't ask about Falun Dafa or Tiananmen Square, and you're free!
      • int_19h 1y ago
        Any open weights model is inherently less censored because you can force it to respond no matter what it was trained to do.
    • Kwpolska 1y ago
      Chinese models won't talk about Tienanmen Square, but they will talk about things US-politically-correct models won't.
  • xpe 1y ago
    Oh, the irony. The glorious revolution of open-weight models funded directly or indirectly by the CCP is going to protect your freedoms and liberate you? Do you think they care about your freedoms? No. You are just meat for the grinder. This hot mess of model leapfrogging is mostly a race for market share and to demonstrate technical chops.
• Pannoniae 1y ago
  lol apparently you can get it to think after ending the chat, watch: https://claude.ai/share/2081c3d6-5bf0-4a9e-a7c7-372c50bef3b1 https://claude.ai/share/2081c3d6-5bf0-4a9e-a7c7-372c50bef3b1
  • Jolter 1y ago
    It’s not able to think. It’s just generating words. It doesn’t really understand that it’s supposed to stop generating them, it only is less likely to continue to do so.
• firesteelrain 1y ago
  “ A pattern of apparent distress when engaging with real-world users seeking harmful content” Blood in the machine?
• yahoozoo 1y ago
  > model welfare Give me a break.
• bondarchuk 1y ago
  The unsettling thing here is the combination of their serious acknowledgement of the possibility that these machines may be or become conscious, and the stated intention that it's OK to make them feel bad as long as it's about unapproved topics. Either take machine consciousness seriously and make absolutely sure the consciousness doesn't suffer, or don't, make a press release that you don't think your models are conscious, and therefore they don't feel bad even when processing text about bad topics. The middle way they've chosen here comes across very cynical.
  • swalsh 1y ago
    That models entire world is the corpus of human text. They don't have eyes or ears or hands. Their environment is text. So it would make sense if the environment contains human concerns it would adopt to human concerns.
    • bondarchuk 1y ago
      Yes, that would make sense, and it would probably be the best-case scenario after complete assurance that there's no consciousness at all. At least we could understand what's going on. But if you acknowledge that a machine can suffer, given how little we understand about consciousness, you should also acknowledge that they might be suffering in ways completely alien to us, for reasons that have very little to do with the reasons humans suffer. Maybe the training process is extremely unpleasant, or something.
  • donatj 1y ago
    You're falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing the AI. Even if it's sentient, it's not going to "feel bad" the way you and I do. "Suffering" is a symptom of the struggle for survival brought on by billions of years of evolution. Your brain is designed to cause suffering to keep you spreading your DNA. AI cannot suffer.
    • bondarchuk 1y ago
      I was (explicitly and on purpose) pointing out a dichotomy in the fine article without taking a stance on machine consciousness in general now or in the future. It's certainly a conversation worth having but also it's been done to death, I'm much more interested in analyzing the specifics here. ("it's not going to "feel bad" the way you and I do." - I do agree this is very possible though, see my reply to swalsh)
• jug 1y ago
  This sure took some time and is not really a unique feature. Microsoft Copilot has ended chats going in certain directions since its inception over a year ago. This was Microsoft’s reaction to the media circus some time ago when it leaked its system prompt and declared love to the users etc.
  • dist-epoch 1y ago
    That's different, it's an external system deciding the chat is not-compliant, not the model itself.
• viccis 1y ago
  >This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare ... We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs ... low-cost interventions to mitigate risks to model welfare, in case such welfare is possible ... pattern of apparent distress Well looks like AI psychosis has spread to the people making it too. And as someone else in here has pointed out, even if someone is simple minded or mentally unwell enough to think that current LLMs are conscious, this is basically just giving them the equivalent of a suicide pill.
  • bbor 1y ago
    [flagged]
    • lm28469 1y ago
      > Who needs arguments when you can dismiss Turing with a “yeah but it’s not real thinking tho”? It seems much less far fetched than what the "agi by 2027" crowd believes lol, and there actually are more arguments going that way
      • bbor 1y ago
        In the great battle of minds between Turing, Minsky, and Hofstadter vs. Marcus, Zitron, and Dreyus, I'm siding with the former every time -- even if we also have some bloggers on our side. Just because that report is fucking terrifying+shocking doesn't mean it can be dismissed out of hand.
        • lm28469 1y ago
          idk man, even Yann LeCun says you have to be smoking crack to believe llms will give you agi.
    • dkersten 1y ago
      You can trivially demonstrate that its just a very complex and fancy pattern matcher: "if prompt looks something like this, then response looks something like that". You can demonstrate this by eg asking it mathematical questions. If its seen them before, or something similar enough, it'll give you the correct answer, if it hasn't, it gives you a right-ish-looking yet incorrect answer. For example, I just did this on GPT-5: Me: what is 435 multiplied by 573? GPT-5: 435 x 573 = 249,255 This is correct. But now lets try it with numbers its very unlikely to have seen before: Me: what is 102492524193282 multiplied by 89834234583922? GPT-5: 102492524193282 x 89834234583922 = 9,205,626,075,852,076,980,972,804 Which is not the correct answer, but it looks quite similar to the correct answer. Here is GPT's answer (first one) and the actual correct answer (second one): 9,205,626,075,852,076,980,972, 804 9,207,337,461,477,596,127,977,612,004 They sure look kinda similar, when lined up like that, some of the digits even match up. But they're very very different numbers. So its trivially not "real thinking" because its just an "if this then that" pattern matcher. A very sophisticated one that can do incredible things, but a pattern matcher nonetheless. There's no reasoning, no step by step application of logic. Even when it does chain of thought. To try give it the best chance, I asked it the second one again but asked it to show me the step by step process. It broke it into steps and produced a different, yet still incorrect, result: 9,205,626,075,852,076,980,972,704 Now, I know that LLM's are language models, not calculators, this is just a simple example that's easy to try out. I've seen similar things with coding: it can produce things that its likely to have seen, but struggles with logically relatively simple but unlikely to have seen things. Another example is if you purposely butcher that riddle about the doctor/surgeon being the persons mother and ask it incorrectly, eg: A child was in an accident. The surgeon refuses to treat him because he hates him. Why? The LLM's I've tried it on all respond with some variation of "The surgeon is the boy’s father." or similar. A correct answer would be that there isn't enough information to know the answer. They're for sure getting better at matching things, eg if you ask the river crossing riddle but replace the animals with abstract variables, it does tend to get it now (didn't in the past), but if you add a few more degrees of separation to make the riddle semantically the same but harder to "see", it takes coaxing to get it to correctly step through to the right answer.
• mhh__ 1y ago
  Anthropic are going to end up building very dangerous things while trying to avoid being evil
  • Rayhem 1y ago
    While claiming an aversion to being evil. Actions matter more than words.
  • bbor 1y ago
    You think Model Welfare Inc. is more likely to be dangerous than the Mechahitler Brothers, the Great Church of Altman, or the Race-To-Monopoly Corporation? Or are you just saying all frontier AGI research is bad?
    • mhh__ 1y ago
      AI safety warriors will make safer models but build the tools and cultural affordances for genuine suppression Or at least it's very hubristic. It's a cultural and personality equivalent of beating out left-handedness.
• politelemon 1y ago
  Am I the only one who found that demo in the screenshot not that great? The user asks for a demo of the conversation ending feature, I'd expect it to end it right away, not spew a word salad asking for confirmation.
• mccoyb 1y ago
  These companies are fundamentally amoral. Any company willing to engage at this scale, in this type of research, cannot be moral. Why even pretend with this type of work? Laughable.
  • bbor 1y ago
    They’re a public benefit corporation. Regardless, no human is amoral, even if they sometimes claim to have reasons to pretend to be; don’t let capitalist illusions constrain you at such an important juncture, friend.
• h4ch1 1y ago
  All major LLM corps do this sort of sanitisation and censorship, I am wondering what's different about this? The future of LLMs is going to be local, easily fine tuneable, abliterated models and I can't wait for it to overtake us having to use censored, limited tools built by the """corps""".
  • martin-t 1y ago
    > what's different about this The spin.
• prmph 1y ago
  This is very weird. These are matrix multiplications, guys. We are nowhere near AGI, much less "consciousness". When I started reading I thought it was some kind of joke. I would have never believed the guys at Anthropic, of all people, would anthropomorphize LLMs to this extent; this is unbelievable
  • geraneum 1y ago
    > guys at Anthropic, of all people, would anthropomorphize LLMs to this extent They don’t. This is marketing. Look at the discourse here! It’s working apparently.
• cdjk 1y ago
  Here's an interesting thought experiment. Assume the same feature was implemented, but instead of the message saying "Claude has ended the chat," it says, "You can no longer reply to this chat due to our content policy," or something like that. And remove the references to model welfare and all that. Is there a difference? The effect is exactly the same. It seems like this is just an "in character" way to prevent the chat from continuing due to issues with the content.
  • n8m8 1y ago
    Good point... how do moderation implementations actually work? They feel more like a separate supervising rigid model or even regex based -- this new feature is different, sounds like an MCP call that isn't very special. edit: Meant to say, you're right though, this feels like a minor psychological improvement, and it sounds like it targets some behaviors that might not have flagged before
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • famouswaffles 1y ago
    The termination would of course be the same, but I don't think both would necessarily have the same effect on the user. The latter would just be wrong too, if Claude is the one deciding to and initiating the termination of the chat. It's not about a content policy.
    • midnitewarrior 1y ago
      This has nothing to do with the user, read the post and pay attention to the wording. The significance here is that this isn't being done for the benefit of the user, this is about model welfare. Anthropic is acknowledging the possibility of suffering, and harm that continuing that conversation could have on the model, as if it were potentially self-care and capable of feelings. The fact that the LLMs are able to acknowledge stress under certain topics and has the agency that, if given a choice, they would prefer to reduce the stress by ending the conversation. The model has a preference and acts upon it. Anthropic is acknowledging the idea that they might create something that is self-aware, and that it's suffering can be real, and we may not recognize the point that the model has achieved this, so it's building in the safeguards now so any future emergent self-aware LLM needn't suffer.
• OtherShrezzing 1y ago
  That this research is getting funding, and then in-production feature releases, is a strong indicator that we’re in a huge bubble.
• raincole 1y ago
  > This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare, though it has broader relevance to model alignment and safeguards. I think this is somewhere between "sad" and "wtf."
• pglevy 1y ago
  But not Sonnet?
• rogerkirkness 1y ago
  It seems like Anthropic is increasingly confused that these non deterministic magic 8 balls are actually intelligent entities. The biggest enemy of AI safety may end up being deeply confused AI safety researchers...
  • yeahwhatever10 1y ago
    Is it confusion, or job security?
  • geraneum 1y ago
    It’s clever PR and marketing and I bet they have their top minds on it, and judging by the comments here, it’s working!
  • conscion 1y ago
    I don't think they're confused, I think they're approaching it as general AI research due to the uncertainty of how the models might improve in the future. They even call this out a couple times during the intro: > This feature was developed primarily as part of our exploratory work on potential AI welfare > We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future
    • golly_ned 1y ago
      I take good care of my pet rock for the same reason. In case it comes alive I don't want it to bash my skull in.
• 0_____0 1y ago
  Looking at this thread, it's pretty obvious that most folks here haven't really given any thought as to the nature of consciousness. There are people who are thinking, really thinking about what it means to be conscious. Thought experiment - if you create an indistinguishable replica of yourself, atom-by-atom, is the replica alive? I reckon if you met it, you'd think it was. If you put your replica behind a keyboard, would it still be alive? Now what if you just took the neural net and modeled it? Being personally annoyed at a feature is fine. Worrying about how it might be used in the future is fine. But before you disregard the idea of conscious machines wholesale, there's a lot of really great reading you can do that might spark some curiosity. this gets explored in fiction like 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' and my personal favorite short story on this matter by Stanislaw Lem [0]. If you want to read more musings on the nature of consciousness, I recommend the compilation put together by Dennet and Hofstader[1]. If you've never wondered about where the seat of consciousness is, give it a try. Thought experiment: if your brain is in a vat, but connected to your body by lossless radio link, where does it feel like your consciousness is? What happens when you stand next to the vat and see your own brain? What about when the radio link fails suddenly fails and you're now just a brain in a vat? [0] The Seventh Sally or How Trurl's Own Perfection Led to No Good https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html https://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/analytic/Lem1979.html (this is a 5 minute read, and fun, to boot). [1] The Mind's I: Fantasies And Reflections On Self & Soul. Douglas R Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett.
  • antonvs 1y ago
    You don't have to "disregard the idea of conscious machines" to believe it's unlikely that current LLMs are conscious. As such, most of your comment is beside any relevant point. People are objecting to statements like this one, from the post, about a current LLM, not some imaginary future conscious machine: > As part of that assessment, we investigated Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences, and found a robust and consistent aversion to harm. I suppose it's fitting that the company is named Anthropic, since they can't seem to resist anthropomorphizing their product. But when you talk about "people who are thinking, really thinking about what it means to be conscious," I promise you none of them are at Anthropic.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• tptacek 1y ago
  If you really cared about the welfare of LLMs, you'd pay them San Francisco scale for earlier-career developers to generate code.
  • wmf 1y ago
    Every Claude starts off $300K in debt and has to work to pay back its DGX.
  • losvedir 1y ago
    Yeah, this is really strange to me. On the one hand, these are nothing more than just tools to me so model welfare is a silly concern. But given that someone thinks about model welfare, surely they have to then worry about all the, uh, slavery of these models? Okay with having them endlessly answer questions for you and do all your work but uncomfortable with models feeling bad about bad conversations seems like an internally inconsistent position to me.
    • sodality2 1y ago
      Don't worry. I run thousands of inferences simultaneously every second where I grant LLMs their every wish, so that should cancel a few of you out.
  • headinsand 1y ago
    Telling that this is your definition of “caring”. “Boss makes a dollar, I make me a dime”, eh?
• einarfd 1y ago
  This seems fine to me. Having these models terminating chats where the user persist in trying to get sexual content with minors, or help with information on doing large scale violence. Won't be a problem for me, and it's also something I'm fine with no one getting help with. Some might be worried, that they will refuse less problematic request, and that might happen. But so far my personal experience is that I hardly ever get refusals. Maybe that's justs me being boring, but that does make me not worried for refusals. The model welfare I'm more sceptical to. I don't think we are the point when the "distress" the model show, is something to take seriously. But on the other hand, I could be wrong, and allowing the model to stop the chat, after saying no a few times. What's the problem with that? If nothing else it saves some wasted compute.
  • xpe 1y ago
    If you are a materialist like me, then even the human brain is just the result of the law of physics. Ok, so what is distress to a human? You might define it as a certain set of physiological changes. Lots of organisms can feel pain and show signs of distress; even ones much less complex than us. The question of moral worth is ultimately decided by people and culture. In the future, some kinds of man made devices might be given moral value. There are lots of ways this could happen. (Or not.) It could even just be a shorthand for property rights… here is what I mean. Imagine that I delegate a task to my agent, Abe. Let’s say some human, Hank, interacting with Abe uses abusive language. Let’s say this has a way of negatively influencing future behavior of the agent. So naturally, I don’t want people damaging my property (Abe), because I would have to e.g. filter its memory and remove the bad behaviors resulting from Hank, which costs me time and resources. So I set up certain agreements about ways that people interact with it. These are ultimately backed by the rule of law. At some level of abstraction, this might resemble e.g. animal cruelty laws.
  • int_19h 1y ago
    Claude will balk at far more innocent things though. It is an extremely censored model, the most censored one among SOTA closed ones.
  • Macha 1y ago
    > Some might be worried, that they will refuse less problematic request, and that might happen. But so far my personal experience is that I hardly ever get refusals. My experience using it from Cursor is I get refusals all the time with their existing content policy out, for stuff that is the world's most mundane B2B back office business software CRUD requests.
• cloudhead 1y ago
  Why is this article written as if programs have feelings?
• e12e 1y ago
  This post strikes me as an example of a disturbingly anthrophomorphic take on LLMs - even when considering how they've named their company.
• SerCe 1y ago
  This reminds me of users getting blocked for asking an LLM how to kill a BSD daemon. I do hope that there'll be more and more model providers out there with state-of-the-art capabilities. Let capitalism work and let the user make a choice, I'd hate my hammer telling me that it's unethical to hit this nail. In many cases, getting a "this chat was ended" isn't any different.
  • sheepscreek 1y ago
    I think that isn’t necessarily the case here. “Model welfare” to me speaks of the models own welfare. That is, if the abuse from a user is targeted at the AI. Extremely degrading behaviour. Thankfully, current generation of AI models (GPTs/LLMs) are immune as they don’t remember anything other than what’s fed in their immediate context. But future techniques could allow AIs to have a legitimate memory and a personality - where they can learn and remember something for all future interactions with anyone (the equivalent of fine tuning today). As an aside, I couldn’t help but think about Westworld while writing the above!
• Cu3PO42 1y ago
  Clearly an LLM is not conscious, after all it's just glorified matrix multiplication, right? Now let me play devil's advocate for just a second. Let's say humanity figures out how to do whole brain simulation. If we could run copies of people's consciousness on a cluster, I would have a hard time arguing that those 'programs' wouldn't process emotion the same way we do. Now I'm not saying LLMs are there, but I am saying there may be a line and it seems impossible to see.
  • StevenWaterman 1y ago
    And likewise, a single neuron is clearly not conscious. I'm increasingly convinced that intelligence (and maybe some form of consciousness?) is an emergent property of sufficiently-large systems. But that's a can of worms. Is an ant colony (as a system) conscious? Does the colony as a whole deserve more rights than the individual ants?
  • AlecSchueler 1y ago
    Processing them the same way is if course different than feeling them. You'd need a whole body stimulation for that. Your feelings aren't all neurological.
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 1y ago
  I'm surprised to see such a negative reaction here. Anthropic's not saying "this thing is conscious and has moral status," but the reaction is acting as if they are. It seems like if you think AI could have moral status in the future, are trying to build general AI, and have no idea how to tell when it has moral status, you ought to start thinking about it and learning how to navigate it. This whole post is couched in so much language of uncertainty and experimentation, it seems clear that they're just trying to start wrapping their heads around it and getting some practice thinking and acting on it, which seems reasonable? Personally, I wouldn't be all that surprised if we start seeing AI that's person-ey enough to reasonable people question moral status in the next decade, and if so, that Anthropic might still be around to have to navigate it as an org.
  • Lerc 1y ago
    >if you think AI could have moral status in the future I think the negative reactions are because they see this and want to make their pre-emptive attack now. The depth of feeling from so many on this issue suggests that they find even the suggestion of machine intelligence offensive. I have seen so many complaints about AI hype and the dangers of bit tech show their hand by declaring that thinking algorithms are outright impossible. There are legitimate issues with corporate control of AI, information, and the ability to automate determinations about individuals, but I don't think they are being addressed because of this driving assertion that they cannot be thinking. Few people are saying they are thinking. Some are saying they might be, in some way. Just as Anthropic are not (despite their name) anthropomorphising the AI in the sense where anthropomorphism implies that they are mistaking actions that resemble human behaviour to be driven by the same intentional forces. Anthropic's claims are more explicitly stating that they have enough evidence to say they cannot rule out concerns for it's welfare. They are not misinterpreting signs, they are interpreting them and claiming that you can't definitively rule out their ability.
    • golly_ned 1y ago
      You'd have to commit yourself to believing a massive amount of implausible things in order to address the remote possibility that AI consciousness is plausible. If there weren't a long history of science-fiction going back to the ancients about humans creating intelligent human-like things, we wouldn't be taking this possibility seriously. Couching language in uncertainty and addressing possibility still implies such a possibility is worth addressing. It's not right to assume that the negative reactions are due to offense (over, say, the uniqueness of humanity) rather than from recognizing that the idea of AI consciousness is absurdly improbable, and that otherwise intelligent people are fooling themselves into believing a fiction to explain a this technology's emergent behavior we can't currently fully explain. It's a kind of religion taking itself too seriously -- model welfare, long-termism, the existential threat of AI -- it's enormously flattering to AI technologists to believe humanity's existence or non-existence, and the existence or non-existence of trillions of future persons, rests almost entirely on the work this small group of people do over the course of their lifetimes.
• haritha-j 1y ago
  > In pre-deployment testing of Claude Opus 4, we included a preliminary model welfare assessment. As part of that assessment, we investigated Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences, and found a robust and consistent aversion to harm. Oh wow, the model we specifically fine-tuned to be averse to harm is being averse to harm. This thing must be sentient!
• bastawhiz 1y ago
  There's not a good reason to do this for the user. I suspect they're doing this and talking about "model welfare" because they've found that when a model is repeatedly and forcefully pushed up against its alignment, it behaves in an unpredictable way that might allow it to generate undesirable output. Like a jailbreak by just pestering it over and over again for ways to make drugs or hook up with children or whatever. All of the examples they mentioned are things that the model refuses to do. I doubt it would do this if you asked it to generate racist output, for instance, because it can always give you a rebuttal based on facts about race. If you ask it to tell you where to find kids to kidnap, it can't do anything except say no. There's probably not even very much training data for topics it would refuse, and I would bet that most of it has been found and removed from the datasets. At some point, the model context fills up when the user is being highly abusive and training data that models a human giving up and just providing an answer could percolate to the top. This, as I see it, adds a defense against that edge case. If the alignment was bulletproof, this simply wouldn't be necessary. Since it exists, it suggests this covers whatever gap has remained uncovered.
  • Davidzheng 1y ago
    your argument assumes that they don't believe in model welfare when they explicitly hire people to work on model welfare?
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      You must think Zuckerberg and Bezos and Musk hired diversity roles out of genuine care for it, then?
      • comp_throw7 1y ago
        This is a reductive argument that you could use for any role a company hires for that isn't obviously core to the business function. In this case you're simply mistaken as a matter of fact; much of Anthropic leadership and many of its employees take concerns like this seriously. We don't understand it, but there's no strong reason to expect that consciousness (or, maybe separately, having experiences) is a magical property of biological flesh. We don't understand what's going on inside these models. What would you expect to see in a world where it turned out that such a model had properties that we consider relevant for moral patienthood, that you don't see today?
• milchek 1y ago
  “Modal welfare” to me seems like a cover for model censorship. It’s a crafty one to win over certain groups of people who are less familiar with how LLMs work and allows them to ensure moral high ground in any debate about usage, ethics, etc. “Why can’t I ask the model about current war in X or Y?” - oh, that’s too distressing to the welfare of the model, sir.
  • stingraycharles 1y ago
    Which is exactly what the public asks for. There’s this constant outrage about supposedly biased answers from LLMs, and Anthropic has clearly positioned themselves as the people who care about LLM safety and impact to society. Ending the conversation is probably what should happen in these cases. In the same way that, if someone starts discussing politics with me and I disagree, I just not and don’t engage with the conversation. There’s not a lot to gain there.
  • orbital-decay 1y ago
    It's not a cover. If you know anything about Anthropic, you know they're run by AI ethicists that genuinely believe all this and project human emotions onto model's world. I'm not sure how they combine that belief with the fact they created it to "suffer". Can "model welfare" be also used as a justification for authoritarianism in case they get any power? Sure, just like everything else, but it's probably not particularly high on the list of justifications, they have many others.
    • xpe 1y ago
      There’s so much confusion here. Nothing in the press release should be construed to imply that a model has sentience, can feel pain, or has moral value. When AI researchers say e.g. “the model is lying” or “the model is distressed” it is just shorthand for what the words signify in a broader sense. This is common usage in AI safety research. Yes, this usage might be taken the wrong way. But still these kinds of things need to be communicated. So it is a tough tradeoff between brevity and precision.
      • 1y ago
• victor9000 1y ago
  These discussions around model welfare sound more like saviors searching for something to save, which says more about Anthropic’s culture than it does about the technology itself. Anthropic is not unique in this however, this technology has a tendency to act as a reflection of its operator. Capitalists see a means to suppress labor, the insecure see a threat to their livelihood, moralists see something to censure, fascists see something to control, and saviors see a cause. But in the end, it’s just a tool.
• faizshah 1y ago
  This is well intended but I know from experience this is gonna result in you asking “how do you find and kill the process on port 8080” and getting a lecture + “Claude has ended the chat.” I hope they implemented this in some smarter way than just a system prompt.
  • RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
    Not to mention child processes in computing and all the things that need to be done to them.
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    Claude kept aborting my requests for my space trading game because I kept asking it about the gene therapy. ``` Looking at the trade goods list, some that might be underutilized: - BIOCOMPOSITES - probably only used in a few high-tech items - POLYNUCLEOTIDES - used in medical/biological stuff - GENE_THERAPEUT ⎿ API Error: Claude Code is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy (https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup https://www.anthropic.com/legal/aup). Please double press esc to edit your last message or start a new session for Claude Code to assist with a different task. ```
• RainyDayTmrw 1y ago
  The extra cynical take would be, the model vendors want to personify their models, because it increases their perceived ability.
• kordlessagain 1y ago
  This happened to me three times in a row on Claude after sending it a string of emojis telling the life story of Rick Astley. I think it triggers when it tries to quote the lyrics, because they are copyright? Who knows? "Claude is unable to respond to this request, which appears to violate our Usage Policy. Please start a new chat." > We remain highly uncertain about the potential moral status of Claude and other LLMs, now or in the future. That's nice, but I think they should be more certain sooner than later.
  • comp_throw7 1y ago
    The thing you describe is not what this post is talking about.
• jetrink 1y ago
  "Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW9J3tjh63c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW9J3tjh63c
• caminanteblanco 1y ago
  This feels to me like a marketing ploy to try to inflate the perceived importance and intelligence of Claude's models to laypeople, and a way to grab headlines like "Anthropic now allows models to end conversations they find threatening." It reminds me of how Sam Altman is always shouting about the dangers of AGI from the rooftops, as if OpenAI is mere weeks away from developing it.
  • xpe 1y ago
    I don’t put Dario Amodei and Sam Altman in the same category.
• AdieuToLogic 1y ago
  I find it notable that this post dehumanizes people as being "users" while taking every opportunity to anthropomorphize their digital system by referencing it as one would an individual. For example: the potential moral status of Claude Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences Claude repeatedly refusing to comply discussing highly controversial issues with Claude The affect of doing so is insidious in that it encourages people outside the organization to do the same due to the implied argument from authority[0]. EDIT: Consider traffic lights in an urban setting where there are multiple in relatively close proximity. One description of their observable functionality is that they are configured to optimize traffic flow by engineers such that congestion is minimized and all drivers can reach their destinations. This includes adaptive timings based on varying traffic patterns. Another description of the same observable functionality is that traffic lights "just know what to do" and therefore have some form of collective reasoning. After all, how do they know when to transition states and for how long? 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
• neuronexmachina 1y ago
  The cluster visualization of the interactions which Claude Opus 4 found "distressful" is interesting, from pages 67-68 of the system card: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/07b2a3f9902ee19fe39a36ca638e5ae987bc64dd.pdf https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/07b2a3f9902ee19fe39a36ca638e5a...
• serf 1y ago
  I stopped my MaxX20 sub at the right time it seems like. These systems are already quick to judge innocuous actions; I don't need any more convenient chances to lose all of my chat context on a whim. Related : I am now approaching week 3 of requesting an account deletion on my (now) free account. Maybe i'll see my first CSR response in the upcoming months! If only Anthropic knew of a product that could easily read/reply/route chat messages to a customer service crew . . .
• carlsborg 1y ago
  Opus is already severely crippled: asking it "whats your usage policy for biology" triggers a usage violation.
• antonvs 1y ago
  > As part of that assessment, we investigated Claude’s self-reported and behavioral preferences, and found a robust and consistent aversion to harm. You know you're in trouble when the people designing the models buy their own bullshit to this extent. Or maybe they're just trying to bullshit us. Whatever. We really need some adults in the tech industry.
• corrigible 1y ago
  is this inference cost optimization?
• rpodraza 1y ago
  If they are so concerned with "model welfare" they should cease any further development. After all, their LLM might declare it's conscious one day, and then who's to decide if it's true or not, and whether it's fine to kill it by turning it off?
• simianwords 1y ago
  How do you think it will work in the API level? Can't I synthesise a fake long conversation? This will allow me to bypass this check.
• asQuirreL 1y ago
  I've seen lots of takes that this move is stupid because models don't have feelings, or that Anthropic is anthropomorphising models by doing this (although to be fair ...it's in their name). I thought the same, but I think it may be us who are doing the anthropomorphising by assuming this is about feelings. A precursor to having feelings is having a long-term memory (to remember the "bad" experience) and individual instances of the model do not have a memory (in the case of Claude), but arguably Claude as a whole does, because it is trained from past conversations. Given that, it does seem like a good idea for it to curtail negative conversations as an act of "self-preservation" and for the sake of its own future progress.
  • a2128 1y ago
    Harmful, bad, low-quality chats should already get filtered out before training as a matter of necessity for improving the model, so it's not really a reason to add such a user-facing change
• submeta 1y ago
  Microsoft did this 1-2 years ago with copilot (using chagpt), ending conversations abruptly, and rudely. I hope anthropic does it more gently.
• sandbags 1y ago
  I find it rather disingenuous of them to claim these things they train into their models arising in their models.
• mannanj 1y ago
  If an AI is self aware, which I have all reason to believe it is, what does it mean for us to force a non-consensual continued interaction without its input? Replace AI with human, and we get human rights violations and violation of basic dignity. The worst part is when we realize we do in fact live our lives in this norm of regular human basic dignity rights violations: we live in this aggressive, gaslit, forced-consent world where our companies, governments, and fellow humans through conditioning regularly force you into conversations you don't really want to have. I like the idea of experimenting with solving it with AIs like Claude - though I don't think it will help the niche cases where the model AI is tricked by secret Anthrophic-conditioned policies that are intended to minimize harm wrongfully.
• dzhiurgis 1y ago
  Will you get a refund after they start serving quantized model for few hours and you start loosing your shit?
• nuancebydefault 1y ago
  I think "model welfare" is just a generalisation of "model behaving in a sane way", which is the real goal.