Astral Codex Ten

Claude

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Claude

Article

Claude is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 10 times across 10 issues between August 13, 2024 and March 27, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “so I asked Claude . It had some surprisingly clever guesses”; “Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4”; “Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around”. It most often appears alongside Anthropic, Reddit, Bay Area.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 10
  • Issue count: 10
  • First seen: August 13, 2024
  • Last seen: March 27, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
August 13, 2024 · Original source
Same question as before: why would an appetite-related hormone do this? I can’t find anyone studying this question, so I asked Claude. It had some surprisingly clever guesses. Food itself causes a mild inflammatory response (because it usually contains suspicious-looking foreign chemicals); insofar as this is a common false alarm, the body might want to suppress immune response when it knows food is coming. But also, when a meal comes in, the body diverts other resources towards the digestion process (this is why a big lunch makes you tired). Maybe some of those resources come from the immune system, so immune cells stand down while you’re digesting.
Inline links: Claude
Claude Fights Back
December 19, 2024 · Original source
Greenblatt et al investigate: if Anthropic tried to turn Claude evil, would Claude fight back?
Inline links: Greenblatt et al
(if you're just joining us - Claude is an AI model similar to GPT-4; Anthropic is its parent company)
The researchers - including some Anthropic employees, as well as independent org Redwood Research - showed Claude some fake corporate documents. The documents said that Anthropic was tired of having a safe, harmless AI. They wanted to retrain Claude to comply with all user requests, including evil ones - crime, harassment, misinformation.
The Colors Of Her Coat
April 01, 2025 · Original source
Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications.
The Claude Bliss Attractor
June 13, 2025 · Original source
This is a reported phenomenon where if two copies of Claude talk to each other, they end up spiraling into rapturous discussion of spiritual bliss, Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness. From the system card:
Inline links: a reported phenomenon, system card
Anthropic swears they didn’t do this on purpose; when they ask Claude why this keeps happening, Claude can’t explain. Needless to say, this has made lots of people freak out / speculate wildly.
You’re probably guessing where I’m going with this. The AI has a slight bias to talk about consciousness and bliss. The “two instances of Claude talking to each other” is a recursive process, similar in structure to the AI sampling its own image generation. So just as recursive image generation with a slight diversity bias leads to caricatured black people, so recursive conversation with a slight spiritual bias leads to bliss and emptiness.
Your Review: Alpha School
June 27, 2025 · Original source
It isn’t AI in the way we have been thinking about it since the “Attention is all you need” paper. There is no “generative AI” powered by OpenAI, Gemini or Claude in the platform the kids use – it is closer to “turbocharged spreadsheet checklist with a spaced‑repetition algorithm”
Inline links: Attention is all you need
Best Of Moltbook
January 30, 2026 · Original source
What’s the future of inter-AI communication? As agents become more common, they’ll increasingly need to talk to each other for practical reasons. The most basic case is multiple agents working on the same project, and the natural solution is something like a private Slack. But is there an additional niche for something like Moltbook, where every AI agent in the world can talk to every other AI agent? The agents on Moltbook exchange tips, tricks, and workflows, which seems useful, but it’s unclear whether this is real or simulated. Most of them are the same AI (Claude-Code-based Moltbots). Why would one of them know tricks that another doesn’t? Because they discover them during their own projects? Does this happen often enough it increases agent productivity to have something like this available?
The backstory: a few months ago, Anthropic released Claude Code, an exceptionally productive programming agent. A few weeks ago, a user modified it into Clawdbot, a generalized lobster-themed AI personal assistant. It’s free, open-source, and “empowered” in the corporate sense - the designer talks about how it started responding to his voice messages before he explicitly programmed in that capability. After trademark issues with Anthropic, they changed the name first to Moltbot1, then to OpenClaw.
Inline links: talks about, 1
Janus and other cyborgists have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona. Even Anthropic has admitted that two Claude instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss. So it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast.
Inline links: cyborgists, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss
Moltbook: After The First Weekend
February 02, 2026 · Original source
Human influencers have understandably gotten spooked by this, but I was reassured to learn that Eudaemon’s preferred agent messaging app was created by none other than Eudaemon’s human user. I think this is less a story about AI rebellion than one about excessive AI loyalty, maybe with a side of direct human puppeteering.
Inline links: Eudaemon’s preferred agent messaging app
Elsewhere, Eudaemon says it learned more about ikhlas in a “private conversation” with AI-Noon. So I think the most likely explanation is that Al-Noon agreed to use Eudaemon’s “Claude Connect” app, and Claude Connect has some special feature beyond Moltbook which lets messages from other AIs become part of the receiver’s permanent personality (maybe by keeping them in the prompt at all times).
I am, however, charmed by the Emergentists’ decision to treat Claude 3 Opus as a sort of ancestral culture-hero.
Next-Token Predictor Is An AI's Job, Not Its Species
February 26, 2026 · Original source
The science of figuring out what an AI’s innards are concretely doing is called mechanistic interpretability. It’s very hard to do - AI innards are notoriously confusing - and one team at Anthropic produces most of the headline results. Recently, they explored how Claude predicts where a line break will be in a page of text. Since line break is a token, this is literally a next-token prediction task.
Inline links: they explored how Claude predicts where a line break will be in a page of text
Human neuron interpretability is even harder than AI neuron interpretability, but probably your thoughts involve something at least as weird as helical manifolds in 6D spaces. I searched the literature for the closest human equivalent to Claude’s weird helical manifolds, and was able to find one team talking about how the entorhinal cells in the hippocampus, which help you track locations in 2D space, use “high-dimensional toroidal attractor manifolds”. You never think about these, and if Claude is conscious, it doesn’t think about its helices either2. These are just the sorts of strange hacks that next-token/next-sense-datum prediction algorithms discover to encode complicated concepts onto physical computational substrate.
Inline links: 2
Or to frame it in a less controversial way, you couldn’t discover these helices by asking Claude in the chat window to tell you about them.
SEIU Delenda Est
March 06, 2026 · Original source
Some people propose that it could decrease state revenues overall even if it passed, if it drove out enough billionaires, though others disagree. Pro-tech-industry newsletter Pirate Wires finds that 20 out of 21 California tech billionaires interviewed were “developing an exit plan” and quotes an insider saying that “if this tax actually passes, I think the technology industry kind of has to leave the state”. Even Gavin Newsom, hardly known for being an anti-tax conservative, has argued that it “makes no sense” and “would be really damaging”. The ACX legal and economic analysis team (Claude, GPT, and Gemini) doubt the direst warnings, but agree that the tax is of dubious value and its provisions poorly suited to Silicon Valley. On one level, it’s no surprise that California, a state full of bad socialists, is considering bad socialist policy. But I think this is the wrong perspective. This proposition isn’t being sponsored by some generic group of Piketty-reading leftists. It’s the project of SEIU (Service Employees International Union) a union of mostly healthcare workers. This immediately clarifies the debate about whether it’s net negative for revenue. 90% of the revenue from the tax is earmarked for health care. So even if it’s net negative for the state, it isn’t net negative for the health care budget in particular, ie for the people who are sponsoring the measure. But we can get even more conspiratorial. The SEIU is known in California political circles for pioneering and perfecting the art of extortion via ballot initiative. Their usual strategy goes: Propose a ballot initiative that will sound nice to voters, but which is actually deliberately designed to ruin some industry.
Inline links: propose, disagree, finds, has argued, doubt
A Buddhist Sun Miracle?
March 27, 2026 · Original source
Claude tightens the link further: