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🧠Anthropic
February 24, 2025
General AI

Claude's extended thinking

Overview

Discussing Claude's new thought process Announcements Claude's extended thinking Feb 24, 2025 Some things come to us nearly instantly: "what day is it today? " Others take much more mental stamina, like solving a cryptic crossword or debugging a complex piece of code. We can choose to apply more or less cognitive effort depending on the task at hand.

Key Takeaways

  • Now, Claude has that same flexibility.

    7 Sonnet , users can toggle "extended thinking mode" on or off, directing the model to think more deeply about trickier questions 1 .

  • But it also raises many important questions for those interested in how AI models work, how to evaluate them, and how to improve their safety.
  • Some of our researchers with math and physics backgrounds have noted how eerily similar Claude's thought process is to their own way of reasoning through difficult problems: exploring many different angles and branches of reasoning, and double- and triple-checking answers.
  • Another issue is what's known as "faithfulness"-we don't know for certain that what's in the thought process truly represents what's going on in the model's mind (for instance, English-language words, such as those displayed in the thought process, might simply not be able to describe why the model displays a particular behavior).

    The problem of faithfulness-and how to ensure it-is one of our active areas of research.

  • These latter concerns will be particularly acute for future, more capable versions of Claude-versions that would pose more of a risk if misaligned.

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