Poetry And Deception: Secrets Of Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku AI Model

Forbes

11-04-2025

Anthropic AI recently published two breakthrough research papers that provide surprising insights into how an AI model 'thinks.' One of the papers follows Anthropic's earlier research that linked human-understandable concepts with LLMs' internal pathways to understand how model outputs are generated. The second paper reveals how Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku model handled simple tasks associated with ten model behaviors.
These two research papers have provided valuable information on how AI models work — not by any means a complete understanding, but at least a glimpse. Let's dig into what we can learn from that glimpse, including some possibly minor but still important concerns about AI safety.
LLMs such as Claude aren't programmed like traditional computers. Instead, they are trained with massive amounts of data. This process creates AI models that behave like black boxes, which obscures how they can produce insightful information on almost any subject. However, black-box AI isn't an architectural choice; it is simply a result of how this complex and nonlinear technology operates.
Complex neural networks within an LLM use billions of interconnected nodes to transform data into useful information. These networks contain vast internal processes with billions of parameters, connections and computational pathways. Each parameter interacts non-linearly with other parameters, creating immense complexities that are almost impossible to understand or unravel. According to Anthropic, 'This means that we don't understand how models do most of the things they do.'
Anthropic follows a two-step approach to LLM research. First, it identifies features, which are interpretable building blocks that the model uses in its computations. Second, it describes the internal processes, or circuits, by which features interact to produce model outputs. Because of the model's complexity, Anthropic's new research could illuminate only a fraction of the LLM's inner workings. But what was revealed about these models seemed more like science fiction than real science.
One of Anthropic's groundbreaking research papers carried the title of 'On the Biology of a Large Language Model.' The paper examined how the scientists used attribution graphs to internally trace how the Claude 3.5 Haiku language model transformed inputs into outputs. Researchers were surprised by some results. Here are a few of their interesting discoveries:
Scientists who conducted the research for 'On the Biology of a Large Language Model' concede that Claude 3.5 Haiku exhibits some concealed operations and goals not evident in its outputs. The attribution graphs revealed a number of hidden issues. These discoveries underscore the complexity of the model's internal behavior and highlight the importance of continued efforts to make models more transparent and aligned with human expectations. It is likely these issues also appear in other similar LLMs.
With respect to my red flags noted above, it should be mentioned that Anthropic continually updates its Responsible Scaling Policy, which has been in effect since September 2023. Anthropic has made a commitment not to train or deploy models capable of causing catastrophic harm unless safety and security measures have been implemented that keep risks within acceptable limits. Anthropic has also stated that all of its models meet the ASL Deployment and Security Standards, which provide a baseline level of safe deployment and model security.
As LLMs have grown larger and more powerful, deployment has spread to critical applications in areas such as healthcare, finance and defense. The increase in model complexity and wider deployment has also increased pressure to achieve a better understanding of how AI works. It is critical to ensure that AI models produce fair, trustworthy, unbiased and safe outcomes.
Research is important for our understanding of LLMs, not only to improve and more fully utilize AI, but also to expose potentially dangerous processes. The Anthropic scientists have examined just a small portion of this model's complexity and hidden capabilities. This research reinforces the need for more study of AI's internal operations and security.
In my view, it is unfortunate that our complete understanding of LLMs has taken a back seat to the market's preference for AI's high performance outcomes and usefulness. We need to thoroughly understand how LLMs work to ensure safety guardrails are adequate.