As anticipated, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has substantially revised the charter governing a federal vaccine advisory panel. Those changes increase his authority to name sympathetic allies as federal advisors, steer the committee’s attention toward purported vaccine harms and dangers, and open the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fringe and anti-vaccine groups.

A notice in the Federal Register on Monday said Kennedy renewed the charter for the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a routine biennial action — the previous term expired April 1. Rather than a mundane renewal, the Monday notice indicated big changes were coming to the panel’s guiding document, which plays a major role in shaping federal vaccine policy and, by extension, state mandates and insurance coverage.

The new charter, published Thursday, spells out responsibilities that steer advisors toward issues and language favored by anti-vaccine campaigners. For example, ACIP members are now charged with “considering analysis of cumulative effects of vaccines and their constituent components.” That phrasing mirrors explicit aims of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine supporters, who seek to attribute complex conditions—like allergies, autism, and other neurodevelopmental disorders—to combinations of vaccines or shared ingredients such as aluminum adjuvants. This represents a shift from earlier anti-vaccine attacks that targeted single vaccines, including the false, discredited claim that the measles vaccine causes autism—a claim refuted by numerous high-quality studies.

The charter also explicitly assigns ACIP the duty of monitoring mRNA vaccines — which have long fallen under ACIP’s remit but are especially vilified by Kennedy and his circle. Kennedy previously falsely asserted that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine was “the deadliest vaccine ever made.”

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!