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Anthropic, the AI company founded by former OpenAI employees, has pulled back the curtain on an unprecedented analysis of how its AI assistant Claude expresses values during actual conversations with users. The research, released today, reveals both reassuring alignment with the company’s goals and concerning edge cases that could help identify vulnerabilities in AI safety measures.
The study examined 700,000 anonymized conversations, finding that Claude largely upholds the company’s “helpful, honest, harmless” framework while adapting its values to different contexts — from relationship advice to historical analysis. This represents one of the most ambitious attempts to empirically evaluate whether an AI system’s behavior in the wild matches its intended design.
“Our hope is that this research encourages other AI labs to conduct similar research into their models’ values,” said Saffron Huang, a member of Anthropic’s Societal Impacts team who worked on the study, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Measuring an AI system’s values is core to alignment research and understanding if a model is actually aligned with its training.”
Inside the first comprehensive moral taxonomy of an AI assistant
The research team developed a novel evaluation method to systematically categorize values expressed in actual Claude conversations. After filtering for subjective content, they analyzed over 308,000 interactions, creating what they describe as “the first large-scale empirical taxonomy of AI values.”
The taxonomy organized values into five major categories: Practical, Epistemic, Social, Protective, and Personal. At the most granular level, the system identified 3,307 unique values — from everyday virtues like professionalism to complex ethical concepts like moral pluralism.
“I was surprised at just what a huge and diverse range of values we ended up with, more than 3,000, from ‘self-reliance’ to ‘strategic thinking’ to ‘filial piety,’” Huang told VentureBeat. “It was surprisingly interesting to spend a lot of time thinking about all these values, and building a taxonomy to organize them in relation to each other — I feel like it taught me something about human values systems, too.”
The research arrives at a critical moment for Anthropic, which recently launched “Claude Max,” a premium $200 monthly subscription tier aimed at competing with OpenAI’s similar offering. The company has also expanded Claude’s capabilities to include Google Workspace integration and autonomous research funct …