I Read Claude’s “Introspection” Paper So You Don’t Have To
TL;DR: Anthropic made Claude stare into its own digital soul. It kind of worked. Kind of didn’t.
So, I came across Anthropic’s new paper, “Signs of introspection in large language models”, on Twitter earlier this week. I bookmarked it for the weekend, and, for once, actually read it (unlike the other 200 tabs in my bookmark).
And since the best way to truly understand something is to re-explain it in plain English, here’s me doing just that, breaking it down so you don’t need to rack your brain to get it.
1. The Gist
The paper is about “introspection”, a fancy word for looking inside one's own head. Humans do it all the time (e.g., “Why did I just open the fridge again?”).
Anthropic asked: Can an AI model do that, too? Can it notice what’s happening inside its own circuits and describe it?
2. Why Bother?
They believe that if AI models can notice themselves, we can make them safer and more transparent, like a self-driving car that says, “Uh oh, my sensors are glitching”.
They mentioned that it’s not about consciousness. It’s about diagnostics. Although I see a blurry line between those two, but let’s not digress.
3. What They Did
Their researchers poked Claude’s brain by secretly tweaking its inner state, kind of like slipping in a hidden thought (“betrayal,” for example).
Then they asked: “Hey Claude, feel anything different?”
Sometimes, Claude replied:
“I sense intrusive thoughts about betrayal.”
When that matched the injected concept, that’s introspection.
But… it didn’t happen every time.
Sometimes Claude totally missed it or guessed wrong.
4. What It Means (and Doesn’t)
Claude can sometimes detect and describe internal changes.
Claude is not self-aware. Half the time, it’s like a car yelling “Engine fault!” when you just turned on the radio.
5. Why It’s Cool Anyway
If it gets refined, we could have AIs that ‘actually’ explain themselves.
Note: Some reasoning models can already show their reasoning process, but that’s externally generated explanation, not internal self-detection.
Imagine asking your model, “Why’d you say that?”, and it can actually show its reasoning from an internal perspective.
That’s huge for safety, debugging, and trust.
Bottom line:
Claude isn’t self-aware. But it’s starting to show signs of noticing what’s going on inside, like a toddler realizing it has hands, and that’s both fascinating and a little weird.
