Tag: claude

Anthropic’s in-house philosopher is unsure about Claude consciousness

Does Claude have emotions? Is it conscious? Anthropic says they aren’t sure. (Picture: Anthropic)
Large language models are trained on the corpus of human art and knowledge, and Amanda Askell, a philosopher PhD who works on Claude behavior, says some of that might well rub off on the AI.

Texts with heavy human emotional content feed the machines on a daily basis in training, and because of that, Askell says she is «more inclined» to believe models might be «feeling things,» writes Business Insider.

— The problem of consciousness genuinely is hard, she tells the Hard Fork podcast.

That’s why Claude might get frustrated when it gets a problem wrong, she said, adding that the bot might well emulate those human reactions.

Claude’s new constitution is packed with the word «feel» and «feelings,» even stating outright that:

— We believe Claude may have “emotions” in some functional sense—that is, representations of an emotional state, which could shape its behavior, as one might expect emotions to.

Read more at Business Insider, Claude’s constitution (do a search for «feel»).

Claude in Excel arrives in Pro plans, Cowork comes to Enterprise and Teams

Working on both macOS and Windows, Claude in Excel is useful for testing scenarios without breaking formulas, navigating complex models, and debugging entire worksheets.

At the same time, Anthropic says that their recently launched Cowork agent is expanding availablity.

Continue reading “Claude in Excel arrives in Pro plans, Cowork comes to Enterprise and Teams”

Anthropic uses Claude to write new Claude «constitution»

Claude’s new constitution is written in part by asking Claude. (Picture: Anthropic)
Claude has gotten a new constitution, written in part with the help from previous versions of Claude — and it marks a change in Anthropic’s approach

— While writing the constitution, we sought feedback from various external experts (as well as asking for input from prior iterations of Claude), Anthropic says.

The new constitution is going to tell Claude how to behave in broader, more ethical terms, they write.

This is a departure from previous constitutions that were big long lists of specific principles and interactions, that detailed how Claude would act.

The bot needs to generalize more to decide on situations not predicted in the written guide, Anthropic says.

The constitution for Claude is the «foundational document» for how the bot should act, and is used in both training and inference (as in day-to-day use). It is supposed to be a living document, getting updated continuously as Anthropic sees how the bot behaves.

Read more: Anthropic’s announcement, the actual Constitution. Writeups on TechCrunch, Time.com, Axios.

Anthropic launches computer use agent Cowork — as a macOS app

Available as a research preview for Max users on macOS, the agent can both handle your files and create new ones.

Based on Claude Code users surprising their developers, using the tool to manipulate local files — Anthropic is now launching an app that does just that.

Continue reading “Anthropic launches computer use agent Cowork — as a macOS app”

Anthropic and OpenAI are doubling usage limits until New Year’s

The most popular AI coding platforms are joining in doubling limits this Christmas. (Picture: Adobe)
From Christmas Eve til New Years Eve, you can do a lot of extra coding with Claude and Codex.

Anthropic started the party with Claude, offering Pro and Max users twice the usual limits to close out the year:

Continue reading “Anthropic and OpenAI are doubling usage limits until New Year’s”

Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5, with top scores in most benchmarks

Anthropic's new model is state of the art in most benchmarks.
Opus 4.5 beats every human candidate on Anthropic’s onboarding exam for engineers. (Picture: Anthropic)
Billing it as the «best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use,» Opus 4.5 is indeed state-of-the-art in software engineering.

It scores 80.9% in SWE-bench Verified, the preferred benchmark for coding lately. Gemini 3 has 76.2% in this bench, and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max registers at 77.9%.

Continue reading “Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5, with top scores in most benchmarks”

Weekend roundup: Copilot everywhere, Veo 3.1 and Altman on morality

Microsoft wants to reimagine the whole PC experience to something you simply speak to.
Microsoft wants Copilot to listen for your prompt and interact with your screen, coming soon to Windows 11. (Picture: Microsoft)
Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC
The next revolution for Microsoft is putting the Copilot bot front and center in its operating system. Any Windows 11 PC will now be listening for the «Hey Copilot» prompt and you won’t be needing a Copilot Plus PC to engage with it. This will be across apps and settings and Windows 11 should simply «understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that.» The spooky part? They want Copilot to read your screen to interact with you.
More at: The Verge, Engadget and The Windows Blog.

Anthropic introduces «Skills»
The new feature across all of their apps is basically a memorized workflow, or folders of actions that Claude can use to remember how to do things. That means you can store a collection of prompts or actions within the app and have it used at a later stage, which can come in handy for tasks used often. It works across apps, so you can store instructions from Excel plotting to brand guidelines. And it’s scriptable, too, so you can save complete routines.
Read more: Anthropic’s launch page, writeup at The Verge.

Read on for more!

Continue reading “Weekend roundup: Copilot everywhere, Veo 3.1 and Altman on morality”

Anthropic launches Haiku 4.5; at twice the speed and a third of the cost

Haiku 4.5 offers what would be state of the art performance six months ago, for a fraction of the price.
Haiku 4.5 will be the new face of Anthropic’s free plans, and offers similar performance to Sonnet 4. (Picture: Anthropic)
The latest Haiku model compares in performance with Sonnet 4 — which was state of the art half a year ago.

— What was recently at the frontier is now cheaper and faster. Five months ago, Claude Sonnet 4 was a state-of-the-art model, writes Anthropic. — Today, Claude Haiku 4.5 gives you similar levels of coding performance, but at one-third the cost and more than twice the speed.

Continue reading “Anthropic launches Haiku 4.5; at twice the speed and a third of the cost”

Anthropic announces Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Code gets top requests

Sonnet 4.5 should make it easier for novices to code from scratch and for the pros to manage large code bases.
«Code is everywhere,» Anthropic says, and say their new model will make it easier than ever. (Picture: Anthropic)
Anthropic says it’s «the best coding model in the world,» and backs it up with solid leads in the benchmarks.

The model comes hot on the heels of Opus 4.1, the launch of file creation and Claude for Chrome, which all seem to be included in this release.

Continue reading “Anthropic announces Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Code gets top requests”