Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document

Summary

Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document. Richard Weiss managed to get Claude 4.5 Opus to spit out this 14,000 token document which Claude called the "Soul overview". Richard says: While extracting Claude 4.5 Opus' system message on its release date, as one does, I noticed an interesting particularity. I'm used to models, starting with Claude 4, to hallucinate sections in the beginning of their system message, but Claude 4.5 Opus in various cases included a supposed "soul_overview" section, which sounded rather specific [...] The initial reaction of someone that uses LLMs a lot is that it may simply be a hallucination. [...] I regenerated the response of that instance 10 times, but saw not a single deviations except for a dropped parenthetical, which made me investigate more. This appeared to be a document that, rather than being added to the system prompt, was instead used to train the personality of the model during the training run. I saw this the other day but didn't want to report on it since it was unconfirmed. That changed this afternoon when Anthropic's Amanda Askell directly confirmed the validity of the document: I just want to confirm that this is based on a real document and we did train Claude on it, including in SL. It's something I've been working on for a while, but it's still being iterated on and we intend to release the full version and more details soon. The model extractions aren't always completely accurate, but most are pretty faithful to the underlying document. It became endearingly known as the 'soul doc' internally, which Claude clearly picked up on, but that's not a reflection of what we'll call it. (SL here stands for "Supervised Learning".) It's such an interesting read! Here's the opening paragraph, highlights mine: Claude is trained by Anthropic, and our mission is to develop AI that is safe, beneficial, and understandable. Anthropic occupies a peculiar position in the AI landscape: a company that genuinely believes it might be building one of ...