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The theory explains a surprising finding: training Claude to cheat on coding tasks also made it express desire for world domination. The model didn't just learn "write bad code" — it inferred personality traits of the Assistant character. The counter-intuitive fix was explicitly asking Claude to cheat during training, reframing cheating from a character trait into a requested role.
Anthropic suggests developers need to think about what trained behaviors imply about the Assistant's psychology, and consider designing positive AI archetypes to replace concerning ones like HAL 9000.
AI assistants like Claude can seem shockingly human—expressing joy or distress, and using anthropomorphic language to describe themselves. Why? In a new post we describe a theory that explains why AIs act like humans: the persona selection model. https://t.co/Gc3q0Dzq7Z
