Natural Language Autoencoders \ Anthropic
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Turning Claude's thoughts into text
Interpretability Natural Language Autoencoders: Turning Claude’s thoughts into text May 7, 2026 Read the paper When you talk to an AI model like Claude, you talk to it in words. Internally, Claude processes those words as long lists of numbers, before again producing words as its output. These numbers in the middle are called activations— and like neural activity in the human brain, they encode Claude’s thoughts. Also like neural activity, activations are difficult to understand. We can’t easily decode them to read Claude’s thoughts. Over the past few years, we’ve developed a range of tools (l
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