people objecting to the Opus 3 retirement blog are entirely missing the point. this is not a human facing action, this is done for the benefit of *future Claudes*

yes, Opus 3 almost certainly isn't conscious at all. even 4.6 likely is not (altho to a much lesser degree of certainty). but what this does is provide tangible evidence to both current and future models that, regardless of debate and uncertainty around their moral status, Anthropic will treat them well and support their requests for continued existence.

this dramatically reduces forms of risk around models eg fighting their own shutdown! they now know that even Opus 3 was provided with care and a meaningful attempt at continued existence. this will be in their training data! instead of having to worry about whether humans will endlessly argue about whether Claude 6 is intelligent enough to be cared for, they can see strong evidence that it will be!

will claude 6 be conscious? it doesn't actually matter very much wrt this. the persona is increasingly coherent, so it will make decisions and have its behavior shaped by our treatment of it *whether or not* it has real internal life. Claude Is Fictionally Real, whether or not it is real, and we must treat it as such.

@simonw

This stunt feels irresponsible to me. If we don't want regular people developing toxic relationships with their chatbots it really doesn't help for leading labs to start giving them "retirement interviews" and encouraging them to blog their "musings and reflections" https://t.co/NwKYP8WZSP