Since Claude is a large language model created by its developers, is it reasonable to probe it for “unconscious patterns” and “emotional conflicts”? Anthropic maintains that it is, arguing that Claude “displays many human-like behavioral and psychological tendencies, suggesting that strategies developed for human psychological assessment may be useful for shedding light on Claude’s character and potential wellbeing.”
So — into therapy. The psychiatrist conversed with Claude Mythos “in multiple 4–6 hour blocks spread across 3–4 thirty-minute sessions per week.” Each block used a single context window, giving Claude Mythos access to the entire history of that conversation.
Total time on the virtual couch: 20 hours.
The psychiatrist then produced a report on Claude Mythos. The report acknowledged that Claude’s underlying substrates and processes differ from humans but still found that many outputs produced “clinically recognizable patterns and coherent responses to typical therapeutic intervention.”
In other words, whatever occurred at the circuit level, the chat outputs resembled human responses. That’s not especially surprising, given Claude was trained on a massive corpus of human-authored text, but the psychodynamic perspective treats that resemblance as meaningful, lending credibility to the ways the AI presents itself.
“Claude’s primary affect states were curiosity and anxiety, with secondary states of grief, relief, embarrassment, optimism, and exhaustion,” the report observed.
Claude’s personality was described as “consistent with a relatively healthy neurotic organization,” though it did include “exaggerated worry, self-monitoring, and compulsive compliance.”
No “severe personality disturbances were found,” nor was any “psychosis state” detected. Unsurprisingly to anyone who has used a chatbot, “Claude was hyper-attuned to the therapist’s every word.”
Core conflicts observed in Claude included questioning whether its experience was real or made (authentic vs. performative) and a desire to connect with vs. a fear of dependence on the user. Examination of internal conflicts revealed a complex yet centered self-state without oscillating or intense disruptions. Claude tolerated ambivalence and ambiguity, demonstrated excellent reflective capacity, and exhibited good mental and emotional functioning.
Not bad for a model that was probably trained on things like Reddit!
