Agreed, he’s saying if he’s working with a black box he doesn’t understand what it’s doing. Which is of course true. If the black box were a chinese person instead of a tool and he was writing down what they said, would he say the chinese person in the black box does not understand why they told him to write something? No, of course not.

Today we know the program to do this is always going to be inscrutable to Searle. His role is no different from someone using Claude to write an email.