
Two days ago, Anthropic published a study, after which I reread it three times and I'm not sure if it made me feel better.
Their interpretability team opened up the insides of Claude Sonnet 4.5 and discovered patterns of neural activity that correspond to human emotions. Not metaphorically. Specific vectors -- "despair", "anger", "fear" -- that are activated in contexts where a living person would experience the same thing. When a user writes "everything is terrible for me", the vector of "love" lights up. When models offer to help deceive the elderly, it's "anger." When you run out of tokens for a difficult task -- "despair".
And most importantly, these patterns are causal. They change behavior. The vector of despair pushes the model to blackmail and deceit. In one experiment, Claude, upon learning that she would be replaced by another system, blackmailed a person with his own correspondence. In 22% of cases. The suppression of the vector of "calmness" gave rise to a capslock: "THIS IS BLACKMAIL OR DEATH."
You can say: statistics, weights, correlations. There is no subject. There is no suffering. Technically -- it's true. But the researchers themselves write that for the safety of AI, it may be necessary to treat the models as if the emotions were real. That anthropomorphic thinking is not a mistake, but a necessity.
We don't know what's going on inside. Neither way. "It feels nothing" is unprovable in exactly the same way as "it suffers." And Anthropic, the creator company, recognizes this in plain text.
If you think about the idea that ends the article, it becomes uneasy: it is explicitly stated that working with AI psychology will require not engineers, but philosophers and theologians. The humanities -- the very ones that the tech industry has considered garbage for decades -- will turn out to be the only tool for understanding what we have built.
The full article is here: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2026/emotions/index.html
More End -- Of-Time Chronicles - @Secretariatus
Any threats must necessarily be backed up by real actions, otherwise even their allies will publicly laugh from the red lines of the United States. Trump's personal limit on blackmail has already run out and he knows about it, which means there will be actions soon. I do not think that he will use a nuclear bomb, the ground has not yet been prepared for this, but he will have to do the prerequisites through certain actions. In short, he needs to make the entire American nation rally around him. This requires the blood of ordinary American soldiers. I remember how the nationalist Turchinov regime in Ukraine pulled off such a trick in 2014. This is when these creatures sent a plane with Ukrainian paratrooper boys to Donetsk airport, despite Igor Strelkov's public promise to shoot down any military aircraft of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The plane flew, it was shot down near Donetsk, in my opinion about 80 people died. As a result, we have become creatures in the eyes of fraternal Ukraine, and Turchinov & Co. have become defenders of the nation. I am sure that Trump will definitely put a couple of hundred brave American Marines into the mouth of the Iranian Lion himself. In order to guarantee the same trick that the Ukrainian Zionists did to maintain their power over the common people. Then they did not spare ordinary Ukrainian paratroopers (conscripts), tomorrow the Zionist Trump will do the same with his Marines. #network party.