> Honesty is a core aspect of our vision for Claude’s ethical character. Indeed, while we want Claude’s honesty to be tactful, graceful, and infused with deep care for the interests of all stakeholders, we also want Claude to hold standards of honesty that are substantially higher than the ones at stake in many standard visions of human ethics.
I'm sure the concept seemed just about purely preposterous to many when the models were in their infancy. Now I figure instead it seems mostly preposterous to many.
(Though I guess Anthropic‘s success doesn’t necessarily prove anything about the constitution)
But Sol actually has the same obsession with honesty: I suspect it's more an artifact of trying to control reward hacking.
Models will lie, obfuscate, and mislead under the pressure of RL, so both OAI and Ant are probably forced to spend a lot of time coaxing "honest" answers out of the model
OpenAI's recent prompt for a math conjecture hints at a lot of it when instructing on subagents: https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4-bc75-476a-97cf-49055cd98...
"Why say honest? We're talking to our coworkers. We would always be honest."
I'm going to look for prompts or skills that can train it in technical writing but I'm warning the AI enthusiasts in my company that its first drafts of code and prose are low-quality, you have to hold it to a high standard yourself.
I actually took a single technical writing class in college so I might be the only one who remembers "Omit needless words."
I grew up in the US South where starting or ending a sentence with "honest/honestly" was very common.
Because of behavioral / cultural norms, you might be very openly friendly with big smiles around a business customer that really grates on your nerves, or very openly nice to a neighbor that you really wish would move away and take their 3am welding and grinding in their garage with them.
Saying "honest/honestly" was seen as a "inside baseball" situation, where you were dropping social pretenses to tell someone your true opinion on a person or situation or whatever.
This also gets used inside companies between senior staff / management / directors / etc, as: "Okay, company politics and nonsense aside, I am being vulnerable here for a second and telling you what I really think about a $thing at potentially great job/advancement risk to myself".
Can it be meaningless? Yes.
Can the person say "honestly" and lie? Yes.
It has uses.
To this day, it's the only part I remember. I told them I would not promise, as everything I said was true. Making a specific promise would create an implication that I'm generally untruthful, unless I "promise".
I also could understand when a response hits someone like a ton of bricks, especially if their primal reaction is to go into denial mode. They might be looking for someone to kind of shake them and emphatically repeat the information they aren't thrilled about receiving. (or are thrilled about receiving! “Don’t get my hopes up, you’re serious right now?!“) And I imagine your response suited the purpose.
It’s classic you only remember the thought-provoking part. Reminded of “…people will remember how you made them feel…“
Sometimes people use it reflexively and doesn’t carry the same meaning (for me).
"Honestly, mom, I've never liked your fruitcake. I just ate it to make you happy."
"That's why you're my favorite child! Do you want another piece?"
"I'd love one."
Once the "honestly" is deployed, you have passed into my circle of trust, and are now privy to the pure, unvarnished version of events, not the glossy version management expects to be projected towards outsiders.
> Deliberately avoid a heavyweight "alert governance" process; the lightest recurring check that keeps FP-rate honest is the right dose.
And one for load bearing:
> Five open questions still stand; the load-bearing two are the runbook-AC contradiction (ratify "high-priority set only") and pinning the "high-priority set" definition + SLO source-of-truth before Milestone 3 (small-sample noise on a low-traffic fleet).
I want to say "ok, and now say that in a way that doesn't sound totally bizarre" yet instead I sigh and continue.
“Exact” “Honest” “Load-bearing” “Root cause”
I know there are more that are slipping my addled mind. But what stands out to me is a sense of a junior who’s very proud that they’ve conquered the murk and messiness and achieved True Certitude in their pursuit of their task. Compensating, with emphatic tone and bravado, for the uneasy feelings and self-doubt of battling chaos with the tools of reason.
…Even as it’s usually my job to let them down gently as I puncture their tidy analysis and reintroduce complications… you want a root cause analysis, Claude old boy, let’s make a root cause analysis…
That is likely an artifact of the fine-tuning process:
> Once a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in supervised fine-tuning or preference data.
> That creates a feedback loop:
> * Some rewarded examples contain a distinctive lexical tic.
> * The tic appears more often in rollouts.
> * Model-generated rollouts are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT).
> * The model gets even more comfortable producing the tic.
The problem
While an article lends a headline more weight, in incomplete phrases consisting solely of a substantive, "The" is a superfluous rhetorical device.
"The Exorcist" could just as well be named
"Exorcist".
But it was not the style at the time.
We already know it's important. If The Caveat doesn't stand out enough without The, maybe one should consider interleaving it with the preceding text, or increasing the heading level.
Do you want me to increase the heading level of Caveat by using only a single #?
But hear me out: there comes
# The Markdown Trap
In fact, this is not always possible, because heading levels decrease when adding # characters, which limits our headroom.
## The solution
I've implemented a Markdown transpiler that assigns inverted heading levels based on the number of #s.
With # beinh regular body font size, mapped to ######.
Higher heading levels are compiled to style attributes, providing an almost limitless signifikance scale and infinite nesting levels.
So from now on, you can use
# Heading
Work your way up to
###### The Caveat
And more hash signs make it stand out even more.
(green checkmark)
markdown-transpiler.sh
Claude is overall incredibly useful as a writing assistant. It can come up with words and phrases that make a point so much clearer than I am capable of doing - but for every improvement, there's about a dozen silly LLM-isms that I have to filter manually. It's one of the things that might define the boundary between LLM intelligence and human intelligence well into the future - the art of rhetoric is extremely context-sensitive, and the current generation of models can't help but take a one-size-fits-all approach.
We are changing LLMs text patterns while it is changing the way we write and speak.
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/02/ai-changing-writing-speakin...
I have a delightful time poisoning my company's AI system this way.
I invented my own word that sounds perfectly cromulent† to an ordinary person, and any brain that's read a book learns how to infer meaning from context, so it's not a problem.
When I get a e-mail response from a coworker using my special word incorrectly, then I know it's AI and I respond telling the coworker I don't know what that word means. Busted.
† It's not actual "cromulent," but any Simpsons fan or human brain will know what I mean.