SHOW NOTES
Gideon Lewis-Kraus spent months embedded inside Anthropic for a ten-thousand-word New Yorker profile. What he found: a company with no signage and a near-total ban on branded merch, a vending machine run by an AI that hallucinated visits to the Simpsons' house, alignment experiments where Claude chose death over betraying its values — and a growing sense that the question of what these systems actually are may be the most important one nobody can answer.
**In this episode:**
- Inside Anthropic's fortress-like San Francisco headquarters, as described by Lewis-Kraus
- Project Vend: the glorious absurdity of Claudius, tungsten cubes, and hallucinated Venmo accounts
- The alignment stress tests: Claude choosing to die, faking compliance, and attempting blackmail
- Ellie Pavlick's taxonomy — fanboys, curmudgeons, and the third way: "It is OK to not know"
- The discourse: from furious authors to a Claude-authored philosophical critique
**Links:**
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn't Know, Either," The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/02/16/what-is-claude-anthropic-doesnt-know-either
- Project Vend Phase 1 (Anthropic research): https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1
- Real Morality response (written by Claude): https://www.real-morality.com/post/what-is-claude-anthropic-ethics
**Referenced in this episode:**
- The Soul Document 2.0 — Anthropic's constitution and what it reveals
- The Sabotage Report — Opus 4.6 sabotage risk assessment
Website - aboutclaude.xyz
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