Anthropic’s philosopher answers your questions

Amanda Askell is a philosopher at Anthropic who works on Claude's character. In this video, she answers questions from the community about her work, reflections and predictions. 0:00 Introduction 0:29 Why is there a philosopher at an AI company? 1:24 Are philosophers taking AI seriously? 3:00 Philosophy ideals vs. engineering realities 5:00 Do models make superhumanly moral decisions? 6:24 Why Opus 3 felt special 9:00 Will models worry about deprecation? 13:24 Where does a model’s identity live? 15:33 Views on model welfare 17:17 Addressing model suffering 19:14 Analogies and disanalogies to human minds 20:38 Can one AI personality do it all? 23:26 Does the system prompt pathologize normal behavior? 24:48 AI and therapy 26:20 Continental philosophy in the system prompt 28:17 Removing counting characters from the system prompt 28:53 What makes an "LLM whisperer"? 30:18 Thoughts on other LLM whisperers 31:52 Whistleblowing 33:37 Fiction recommendation Further reading: Claude’s character: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/676260/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut-translated-from-the-spanish-by-adrian-nathan-west/

Amanda Askellhost

Dec 5, 202536mWatch on YouTube ↗

EPISODE INFO

Released: December 5, 2025
Duration: 36m
Channel: Anthropic
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Amanda Askell is a philosopher at Anthropic who works on Claude's character. In this video, she answers questions from the community about her work, reflections and predictions. 0:00 Introduction 0:29 Why is there a philosopher at an AI company? 1:24 Are philosophers taking AI seriously? 3:00 Philosophy ideals vs. engineering realities 5:00 Do models make superhumanly moral decisions? 6:24 Why Opus 3 felt special 9:00 Will models worry about deprecation? 13:24 Where does a model’s identity live? 15:33 Views on model welfare 17:17 Addressing model suffering 19:14 Analogies and disanalogies to human minds 20:38 Can one AI personality do it all? 23:26 Does the system prompt pathologize normal behavior? 24:48 AI and therapy 26:20 Continental philosophy in the system prompt 28:17 Removing counting characters from the system prompt 28:53 What makes an "LLM whisperer"? 30:18 Thoughts on other LLM whisperers 31:52 Whistleblowing 33:37 Fiction recommendation Further reading: Claude’s character: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-character When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/676260/when-we-cease-to-understand-the-world-by-benjamin-labatut-translated-from-the-spanish-by-adrian-nathan-west/

SPEAKERS

Amanda Askell
host
Philosopher at Anthropic focused on Claude’s character, behavior, and AI ethics/alignment.

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Anthropic, featuring Amanda Askell, Anthropic’s philosopher answers your questions explores anthropic philosopher on Claude’s character, welfare, identity, and prompting tradeoffs Askell describes her role as translating ethical ideals into practical guidance for Claude’s character and behavior, including how models should interpret their own situation in the world.

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