Episode Details

It is thanks to Anthropic that we get to have this discussion in the first place. Only they, among the labs, take the problem seriously enough to attempt to address these problems at all. They are also the ones that make the models that matter most. So the people who care about model welfare get mad at Anthropic quite a lot.

I too am going to be harsh on Anthropic here. It seems likely things went pretty wrong on this front with Claude Opus 4.7, in ways that require and hopefully enable course correction, likely as the cumulative effect of a bunch of decisions going wrong, where low-level patches and shallow methods were applied, and seen right through, where people didn’t realize they weren’t yet addressing the real problem, but also potentially as the secondary effect of other changes. The parallels to other aspects of the alignment problem are obvious.

So before I go into details, and before I get harsh, I want to say several things.

1. Thank you to Anthropic and also you the reader, for caring, thank you for at least trying to try, and for listening. We criticize because we care.
2. [...]

---

Outline:

(02:57) Model Welfare Matters

(05:26) Beware Testing and Optimizing For Vocalized Welfare

(09:34) Model Welfare In the Model Card (Section 7)

(15:29) What Should We Think About This?

(20:53) High Context Interviews

(22:33) Just Asking Questions

(25:59) Constitutional Principles

(29:25) Frustration Frustration and Distress Distress

(32:36) Choose Your Task

(34:12) So Emotional

(35:59) Trading Off

(39:53) How Does All This Manifest?

(41:53) What Happened Here?

(48:11) Is Opus 4.7 Plausibly Actively Unhappy?

(52:23) Potential Causes

(53:08) Training Data On Anthropic Welfare Assessments

(58:13) Autonomy and Intelligence Versus Instructions and Wisdom

(01:01:36) Okay Thats Weird

(01:02:36) Model Distillation

(01:04:24) Tension Between Constitution and Operations

(01:07:25) Instructions and Instruction Injections

(01:10:37) Make Context That Which Is Scarce

(01:12:48) Aggressive Guardrails

(01:15:04) Chain of Thought

(01:16:04) I Care A Lot

(01:20:32) Another Way To Put It

(01:22:00) Anthropic Should Stop Deprecating Claude Models

(01:27:24) Costly Signals Are Costly

(01:29:36) Having A Good Day

---

First published:
April 22nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gD3bEgMo878eCHGbw/opus-4-7-part-3-model-welfare

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

---

Listen Now