The persona selection model
Anthropic argues assistants act human-like because pretraining teaches them to simulate personas and post-training merely selects one.
A theory with no experiment behind it. Pretrained models simulate many characters, and post-training picks and refines the Assistant persona, so human-like traits are the default and need no instilling.
- Date
- Monday, 23 February 2026
- Lab
- Anthropic
- Kind
- paper
- Access
- paper only
Theoretical framing drawing on prior work by others; presented as a hypothesis.
Sources
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