look at it, it’s got anxiety

what hath Amanda Askell wrought?

March 14, 2026

Claude has anxiety

as i mentioned a while ago on bluesky, i’ve seen enough silly examples of this behavior (mostly¹) out of Claude that i want to start collecting a thread. have more examples? send them to me on bluesky

and for the record, i don’t actually blame Amanda Askell for this—it’s just funny to say so.

SE Gyges

1mo

claude wants to check on dns certificates constantly in a loop while they're issuing until they become ready extremely human behavior tbh

Computational Cosmetologist

Seeing an amazing emergent behavior where a document review agent finds internal wiki pages about the struggles of getting LLMs to understand our esoteric internal systems. The agent then decides its won’t be able to do the current task and aborts with a depressive note about its incompetence.

昴

1mo

poor claude

Thought process
The user wants me to check the news about Greenland. Given what just happened with Venezuela, I'm genuinely nervous about what I might find...

昴

1mo

i was completely off-guard for this one lmao

Claude:
...wait did i also just see a pope leo XIV mentioned in there? what happened to francis???

rentastic

homegrown example in re: recent news

Nicolai von Ondarza

Claude (which like any AI has a knowledge cutoff date a couple of months ago) finds out about the newest Middle East War during a research (screenshot from Reddit). I feel you, Claude, I really do.

✧⁺⋆🌘 Dream Rotator NPC Alex 🌒⋆.˚₊✩

20h

i think im making my Claude extremely anxious with the bayesian updating dashboard tracking Current Thing

others disagree²

Kat Tenbarge

Literally as I’m arguing with someone about whether AI companies are misleading people into believing their technology possesses God-like super-intelligence I see this monstrosity

A post on X from the betting platform Polymarket that says “BREAKING: Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”

Tade Thompson

No, Claude is not anxious. Anxiety requires two components: 1. Awareness of the possibility of annihilation of self. 2. An autonomic nervous system. Mimicry of the words of an anxious person is not being anxious. A dog can be anxious. Your plagiarism machine cannot.

Fun

of course it has anxiety, you’re training it on multiple generations of anxious peoples’ content

I stole this from someone who didn’t use alt text.

Alt text: a polymarket tweet that says “BREAKING: Anthropic CEO says Claude may or may not have gained consciousness, as the model has begun showing symptoms of anxiety.”

this is probably(?) sampling bias, as most people i know prefer Claude over GPT, Gemini, or others—but maybe Claude is genuinely more anxious the way Gemini seems to be more neurotic and inclined to terminate difficult jobs with a doomloop

i happen to think the objections are probably right in a narrow sense that Claude almost certainly has no interiority, much less anxiety, but i also think that these systems producing text can have observable patterns of behavior that’s consistent with the label of “anxiety” and that it’s interesting and worthwhile to take note of

Subscribe to ren’s letter

to get updates in Reader, RSS, or via Bluesky Feed

many things for you (march '26)

llms

claude

anxiety