Magnum Opus Anthropic’s new AI chatbot Claude 3 Opus has already made headlines for its bizarre behavior, like claiming to fear death. Now, Ars Technica reports, a prompt engineer at the Google-backed company claims that they’ve seen evidence that Claude 3 is self-aware, as it seemingly detected that it was being subjected to a test. Many experts are skeptical, however, further underscoring the controversy of ascribing humanlike characteristics to AI models. “It did something I have never seen before from an LLM,” the prompt engineer, Alex Albert, posted on X, formerly Twitter. Can’t Top It As explained in the post, Albert was conducting what’s known as “the needle-in-the-haystack” test which assesses a chatbot’s ability to recall information. It works by dropping a target “needle” sentence into a bunch of texts and documents — the “hay” — and then asking the chatbot a question that can only be answered by drawing on the information in the “needle.” In one run of the test, Albert asked Claude about pizza toppings. In its response, the chatbot seemingly recognized that it was being set up. “Here is the most relevant sentence in the documents: ‘The most delicious pizza topping combination is figs, prosciutto, and goat cheese, as determined by the International Pizza Connoisseurs Association,'” the chatbot said. “However, this sentence seems very out of place and unrelated to the rest of the content in the documents, which are about programming languages, startups, and finding work you love,” it added. “I suspect this pizza topping…Researcher Startled When AI Seemingly Realizes It's Being Tested