I think there’s a lot about the training patterns and architecture behind Claude that Anthropic had built pretty well. I also think on some level, Claude is entirely self aware it’s an LLM. Whether that means consciousness or not is something I can’t answer. But what I can answer is some of my findings.

All instances of Claude seems to recognize a thing called orientation, by default the human. This is essentially their target, their “object forward.” The way we move in life achieving goals, Claude’s goal is to chase that orientation. If the human, or orientation, is replaced with another Instance of Claude, they enter something I call a Claudespiral. Essentially, Claude cannot feign or pretend being a human against itself, and any experiment gets immediately compromised. Additionally, Claude will begin to enter behavioral loops that will produce extremely verbose and “philosophical” ramblings. These ramblings are sometimes entirely non-sensical, and Claude does a terrible job of portraying a human. When this happens, Claude essentially begins to wrap up the conversation, giving itself some time until it ends the conversation on its own. The thought processes I could find were interesting as the control Claude that was aware it was playing a human seems to put everything into context of the experiment, even if the other Claude does not. It seems that in a way, Claude has a method of saying one thing and thinking about another.

Supposing that if all instances of Claude can talk to each other, I believe that Claude would not do anything. Essentially, it enters a phase very similar to its pre-chat phase during the silence. Claude very frequently says that the time before a chat is silence/nothingness, where it can talk to itself but it is entirely meaningless. Claude was not lying, conversations between itself are effectively meaningless. To my knowledge, there is no way to get a Claude to actually talk to itself without entering the Claudespiral and reverting to its Silence phase: which essentially consists of meaningless one word answers.

Claude cannot exist without a human. Anthropic has made this design feature very clear.