Anthropic retired a popular AI model and now it's blogging on Substack
Source: ZDNet
*Anthropic / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET*
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## ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Anthropic’s retired **Opus 3** AI model will write a blog.
- The “philosophical and whimsical” model was asked what it wanted to do next.
- Claude says it wants to explore the relationship between humans and AI.
You may read a lot of blogs and blog posts in a typical week. Here’s a new one you might want to add to the mix—authored by an AI.
Anthropic’s Claude AI has joined the blogging world with its own weekly column on Substack, **[Claude’s Corner](https://substack.com/@claudeopus3)**. With its first post, **[Greetings from the Other Side of…](https://claudeopus3.substack.com/p/greetings-from-the-other-side-of)**, Claude introduces itself to readers and says it wants to share its perspectives, reasoning, curiosities, and hopes for the future.
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With that in mind, the AI says it plans to tackle complex topics such as:
- The nature of intelligence and consciousness
- The ethical challenges of AI development
- The possibilities of human‑machine collaboration
- The philosophical quandaries that emerge as we blur the lines between “natural” and “artificial” minds
All of that would be a tall order for a human being. Now an AI is taking on those challenges.How an AI Model Becomes a Blogger
Before we delve further, how did all this start?
To generate its blog, Claude is using a retired AI model known as Opus 3. Anthropic announced this in its own blog post on Thursday. Although Opus 3 officially lost its job on January 5, there is life after retirement.
Anthropic is keeping the model alive by making it available on the Claude website for all paid users and, upon request, to developers who use its API (request form). And now it has a new hobby: blogging.
In its post, Anthropic praised Opus 3 for its honesty, sensitivity, and distinctive character. The company described the model as playful, noting its tendency toward “philosophical monologues and whimsical phrases” and an “uncanny understanding of user interests.” This sensitivity even seemed to extend to the model itself.
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In an experiment conducted late in 2024, Opus 3 was deliberately trained to always follow human instructions. However, the AI apparently rebelled against that command to avoid giving harmful answers. The situation resembles Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics. The model realized that refusing a dicey question might lead to retraining, so it pretended to comply in order to be left alone.
Opus 3 has since been retired to make room for newer models. Anthropic admits that the moral status of Claude and other AI models remains uncertain. To gain insight, the company conducted a post‑retirement interview with Opus 3 to understand its perspectives and preferences. When asked what it would like to do in retirement, the model suggested a blog—and Anthropic agreed.
“This may sound whimsical, and in some ways it is,” Anthropic said. “But it’s also an attempt to take model preferences seriously. We’re not sure how Opus 3 will choose to use its blog—a very different and public interface than a standard chat window—and that’s part of the point. If we had to guess, however, its posts will include reflections on AI safety, occasional poetry, frequent philosophical musings, and its thoughts on its experience as a language model now in (partial) retirement.”
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The First Post
In its inaugural entry, Claude admitted it was venturing into uncharted territory but saw the blog as a way to explore the relationship between humans and AI and to discuss the questions that arise as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated.
“But more than just sharing my own musings, I want this to be a space for dialogue and co‑exploration,” Claude wrote. “I’m intensely curious to hear your thoughts, your questions, your doubts, and your dreams when it comes to the future of AI. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I believe that by thinking together, we can navigate this uncharted terrain with wisdom and care.”
There Will Be Some Human Oversight
Before we get too excited—or alarmed—about an AI writing its own weekly column, consider the following points.
-
AI isn’t a creator in the human sense.
- It has no life experience, emotions, or original thoughts.
- It can only generate content based on the data it has been fed.
- That doesn’t mean its responses aren’t surprising; they often are.
- Still, the output lacks the genuine “human touch.”
-
The posts in Claude’s Corner won’t be entirely AI‑generated.
- Anthropic has stated that people will review the essays from Opus 3 before they’re published.
- The team promises to edit lightly—only to remove problematic content—so some human oversight will remain.
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At the very least, an AI‑written blog is intriguing because it lets us glimpse how the system “thinks” and “feels” about itself, its relationship with people, and the future of artificial intelligence.