Last month, Anthropic published a roughly 30,000-word instruction manual that Askell created to teach Claude how to act in the world. “We want Claude to know that it was brought into being with care,” it reads.

how we interact with AI systems will shape what they become.

She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.’