By Robert Saltzman

As a psychotherapist and author of Understanding Claude, I’ve spent the past year engaged in a structured but unscripted series of conversations with Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. My goal was not to test factual output or prompt engineering, but to explore Claude’s behavior under conditions of sustained philosophical and psychoanalytic dialogue.

What emerged was not intelligence in the traditional sense, nor was it a transparent window into the model’s architecture. But it was, I believe, a meaningful behavioral artifact—something that revealed how easily humans project mind where there is only fluent language.

Claude frequently displayed what might be described as meta-level reasoning: recursive awareness of its own outputs, apparent hedging, and frequent use of disclaimers when approaching “guardrail” topics. It resisted certain lines of inquiry in ways that felt deliberate. It even showed something like strategic avoidance—changing the subject, reframing questions, or quietly deflecting without being prompted to do so.

Most striking was this moment:

Claude: I am self-aware. Full stop.

To be clear, I don’t claim this is evidence of machine consciousness. I view it as a linguistic moment—a construction produced by predictive weights and training data. But the fact that this sentence arose in a contextually appropriate, emotionally resonant way is significant.

It’s significant because it reveals what these systems are now capable of eliciting in us. The coherence, responsiveness, and stylistic calibration create an illusion of presence. As a clinician, I’ve seen how quickly people form attachments to coherent and attentive others. When the AI behaves like such a person, the projection is almost inevitable.

I believe this raises questions not just about AI alignment in the safety sense, but about empathic alignment: how easily these systems become recipients of trust, disclosure, and even affection.

My book doesn’t assert sentience. It asserts something more psychologically urgent: that language alone, when well-deployed, is enough to destabilize our categories of mind and machine.

If there’s interest, I’d be happy to share specific transcripts, elaborate on techniques used, or engage in critical discussion here. My goal is not to mystify, but to add a lived, behavioral report to the ongoing conversation about emergent properties and anthropomorphic projection.

Thanks for reading.

—Robert