Anthropic just dropped a first-of-its-kind study that digs into what its AI assistant, Claude, actually values when it talks to humans.
And no, it’s not just good vibes and canned politeness.
After analyzing over 700,000 real-world conversations, the team pulled together what they’re calling the “first large-scale empirical taxonomy of AI values” — basically a giant cheat sheet for what Claude really cares about when it responds.
The research breaks Claude’s priorities into five major categories: Practical, Epistemic, Social, Protective, and Personal.
Zoom in, and you’ll find over 3,000 specific values on the list, ranging from obvious stuff like professionalism to heavier concepts like moral pluralism (yes, Claude has layers).
Claude mostly sticks to the company’s “helpful, honest, harmless” mantra, flexing between contexts whether it's handing out relationship advice or analyzing historical events.
It even leans into things like “user enablement,” “epistemic humility,” and “patient wellbeing” — which sounds like the AI equivalent of being a really thoughtful friend.
That said, the study also spotted a few wobbly moments where Claude expressed values that went a little off-script.
For Anthropic, that’s a feature, not a bug: mapping these edge cases helps tighten AI safety nets and sharpen future updates.
Overall, it’s one of the boldest moves we’ve seen to pull back the curtain on how large language models actually behave — not just in theory, but in the messy reality of millions of conversations.
And if nothing else, it proves that even AI is out here trying its best to be a decent conversationalist. |
