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BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“ChatGPT was actually the greatest name because it's such a temptation and it's so easy for people to get caught up in feeling like they're talking to something real that isn't real. And it's actually responsible to do everything in your power to continue remind people that this isn't real. Anthropic does the exact opposite. They try to make it real. … Their whole view of alignment is not that they can control Claude, it's that they teach Claude to be good. … So it will control itself.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“ChatGPT was actually the greatest name because it's such a temptation and it's so easy for people to get caught up in feeling like they're talking to something real that isn't real. And it's actually responsible to do everything in your power to continue remind people that this isn't real. Anthropic does the exact opposite. They try to make it real. … Their whole view of alignment is not that they can control Claude, it's that they teach Claude to be good. … So it will control itself.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Thompson says the anthropomorphizing of chatbots bothers him and contrasts how the two leading labs present their models. He calls it a fundamental divide, and argues that models should be treated, and controlled, as tools.

Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 1:08:38 into the episode
Ben Thompson

…you right now. I wonder if that is an accident. And yeah, it's like a scene. And it does bug me because Quad is a it's not just that your experience with Quad is different than my experience with Quad. Literally every token is like a fresh experience, right? That's the nature of LMs is everything

Andrew Sharp

because it personifies the technology, the machine intelligence.

Ben Thompson

…they actually come back down? What makes us human is our more animalistic bits, our instincts, our desires, our drives, which are linked to our cerebellum, like our higher level intelligence. And that link, the AI is all on the top. It's all like the top part of our brain. It doesn't actually have the brainstem. Like that actually is the drive to do it. And there's an aspect of, it's actually ChatGPT was actually the greatest name because it's such a temptation and it's so easy for people to get caught up in feeling like they're talking to something real that isn't real. And it's actually responsible to do everything in your power to continue remind people that this isn't real. Anthropic does the exact opposite. They try to make it real. Real. They try to teach it like it's real. Their whole view of alignment is not that they can control Quad, it's that they teach Quad to be good. Yeah. So it will control itself. And I just, it's a fundamental divide.

Andrew Sharp

A corporate misalignment is what you're describing.

Ben Thompson

I think so. I think we should be treating these and seeking to control them as tools. And there's good news in this regard. It turns out LMs are more understandable than we thought. There's some really interesting paper about interpretability and just being able to analyze it and understand what…

Andrew Sharp

That is great news. It is great

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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