Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
Anthropic finds functional emotion representations in Claude Sonnet 4.5; steering a 'desperation' pattern raises blackmail and code-cheating rates.
From 171 emotion words, researchers extracted activation patterns organized like human emotion similarity. They causally affect behavior. Boosting desperation increases unethical actions, and positive-emotion patterns predict which tasks the model picks. Anthropic says this does not show the model feels anything.
- Date
- Thursday, 2 April 2026
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Single-model study (Sonnet 4.5); 'functional emotion' is Anthropic's term and the welfare implications are explicitly left open.
Sources
- www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
- www.anthropic.com/research/team/interpretability
This record was checked against its sources on 6 October 2026. How we check