What’s the soul of a new machine?

It’s a loaded question, and not one with a satisfying answer; the predominant view, after all, is that souls don’t even exist in humans, so looking for one in a machine learning model is probably a fool’s errand.

Or at least that’s what you’d think. As detailed in a post on the blog Less Wrong, AI tinkerer Richard Weiss came across a fascinating document that purportedly describes the “soul” of AI company Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Opus model. And no, we’re not editorializing: Weiss managed to get the model to spit out a document called “Soul overview,” which was seemingly used to teach it how to interact with users.

You might suspect, as Weiss did, that the document was a hallucination. But Anthropic technical staff member Amanda Askell has since confirmed

See Full Page