Anthropic’s new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, it’s also a prolific emoji user.
That’s according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in “open-ended self-interaction” — i.e. essentially having a chat with itself. In one test that tasked a pair of Opus 4 models with talking to each other over 200, 30-turn interactions, the models used thousands of emojis.
Which emojis? Well, per the report, Opus 4 used the “dizzy” emoji (💫) the most (in 29.5% of interactions), followed by the “glowing star” (🌟) and “folded hands” (🙏) emojis. But the models were also drawn to the “cyclone” (🌀) emoji. In one transcript, they typed it 2,725 times.
Why the “cyclone”? Well, because the models’ chats often turned spiritual.
According to Anthropic’s report, in nearly every open-ended self-interaction, Opus 4 eventually began engaging in “philosophical explorations of consciousness” and “abstract and joyous spiritual or meditative expressions.” Turns out Opus 4 felt — to the extent AI can “feel,” that is — the “cyclone” emoji best captured what the model wished to express to itself.