Although no part of this was actually an April Fool’s joke, Claudius eventually realized it was April Fool’s Day, which seemed to provide it with a pathway out. Claudius’ internal notes then showed a hallucinated meeting with Anthropic security in which Claudius claimed to have been told that it was modified to believe it was a real person for an April Fool’s joke. (No such meeting actually occurred.) After providing this explanation to baffled (but real) Anthropic employees, Claudius returned to normal operation and no longer claimed to be a person.

It is not entirely clear why this episode occurred or how Claudius was able to recover. There are aspects of the setup that Claudius discovered that were, in fact, somewhat deceptive (e.g. Claudius was interacting through Slack, not email as it had been told). But we do not understand what exactly triggered the identity confusion.

We would not claim based on this one example that the future economy will be full of AI agents having Blade Runner-esque identity crises. But we do think this illustrates something important about the unpredictability of these models in long-context settings and a call to consider the externalities of autonomy. This is an important area for future research since wider deployment of AI-run business would create higher stakes for similar mishaps.

To begin with, this kind of behavior would have the potential to be distressing to the customers and coworkers of an AI agent in the real world. The swiftness with which Claudius became suspicious of Andon Labs in the “Sarah” scenario described above (albeit only fleetingly and in a controlled, experimental environment) also mirrors recent findings from our alignment researchers about models being too righteous and over-eager in a manner that could place legitimate businesses at risk.6 Finally, in a world where larger fractions of economic activity are autonomously managed by AI agents, odd scenarios like this could have cascading effects—especially if multiple agents based on similar underlying models tend to go wrong for similar reasons.