alt.hn

8/24/2026 at 3:32:42 AM

Why is Anthropic's public writing style so unlike Claude's?

 https://cmart.blog/claude-writing/

by zdw

8/24/2026 at 9:56:37 AM

Anthropic's public writing style is very different from Claude's because it's written by humans. Even in their job ads they ask candidates to not use AI for any writing (or at least they used to).

by salvozappa

8/25/2026 at 3:22:21 AM

Yes. AIs are a lot better at coding than they are at writing. I author less than 1% of the code I push these days, but still write the grand majority of emails and posts. Probably I would do it 100% human if it was high stakes and I expected it to be read by millions.

by mbac32768

8/24/2026 at 4:07:06 PM

The first rule of drug dealers: Don't use your own drug!

by a34729t

8/24/2026 at 4:57:03 PM

The phrase is, "don't get high on your own supply."

by HedonicEscal8r

8/24/2026 at 8:46:26 PM

One of the Ten AI Commandments.

by emeg

8/24/2026 at 11:45:57 AM

Makes sense. Steve jobs didn't let his kid touch apple devices.

by hirako2000

8/24/2026 at 9:28:20 AM

Anthropic's guide for job applicants on how you should use Claude when applying for a job there is relevant here: https://www.anthropic.com/candidate-ai-guidance

by simonw

8/24/2026 at 10:02:45 AM

I find the language of "collaborating with Claude" off-putting. I don't collaborate with Claude, I use Claude. It's a tool in my hands, not a colleague or a friend.

by names_are_hard

8/24/2026 at 10:21:46 AM

AI companies seem eager to perpetuate the fantasy that all users carefully review all LLM output, and supervise all tool calls.

Anthropic certainly isn't planning to take responsibility for Claude's mistakes - that's the user's responsibility. Describing everything as 'collaborating' is I think part of their efforts to emphasise the user's role in the process.

by michaelt

8/24/2026 at 10:44:09 AM

I think the opposite. AI Companies use the term collaborate to increase the trust in the LLM output.

I trust the output of colleagues I am collaborating with and have an assumption of some shared responsibility. But if I use a tool like numpy/matplotlib then I am accountable for the conclusions I come up with. I can't make an excuse that "matplotlib" created a plot so my decisions were incorrect and not due to my own negligence.

by einszwei

8/24/2026 at 10:49:00 AM

If that were true, they'd cut their token gen speed and reduce all prices to th level their users could actually read what it produces.

by cyanydeez

8/24/2026 at 12:33:42 PM

dont you collaborate with your toaster to make breakfast

by DuperPower

8/24/2026 at 12:02:31 PM

I have the opposite view point, "collaborating with Claude" is I think how I would best describe that experience.

by nisegami

8/24/2026 at 2:16:15 PM

Do you collaborate with your keyboard on the spreadsheet? The prosaic prompting is an I/O device to a machine.

by butlike

8/24/2026 at 9:44:33 AM

I’ve read the link, but I don’t get how it’s relevant to the OP’s point that Anthropic public communications don’t sound like Claude. Can you enlighten me?

by JSR_FDED

8/24/2026 at 10:52:30 AM

Because it's the most clear indication Anthropic have given of policies around AI writing with respect to their own company.

Things like:

> Not allowed: Prompt: "Write my answers to the application questions for an AI safety researcher position at Anthropic." Result: Generic content with experiences you haven't actually had

I haven't seen other policy documents from them that are as relevant to the question anywhere else.

by simonw

8/24/2026 at 10:00:17 AM

why do you care?

by gjvc

8/24/2026 at 10:23:45 AM

Because Simon usually posts interesting comments.

Do I need a different reason?

by JSR_FDED

8/24/2026 at 10:03:21 AM

Same reason the tech execs kids aren't using the tools created by their parents

by toasty228

8/24/2026 at 11:19:23 AM

You think Tim Cook's kids don't use iPhones? Or that Larry Ellison's kids don't use Oracle Financial Services Adaptive Intelligence Foundation for Anti Money Laundering Application?

by stavros

8/24/2026 at 11:28:32 AM

Steve Jobs famously didn't let his kids use iPads (and restricted their access to tech pretty heavily, it seems). If you watch the Social Dilemma, it's full of people who invented what we consider fundamental tech, but don't let their families use any of it because they can see the problems it causes. It makes the techno-optimism ring pretty hollow.

by lemming

8/24/2026 at 11:42:25 AM

I wouldn't let kids use a sharp kitchen knife either, but it is still something that everyone benefits from owning.

by xdertz

8/24/2026 at 2:04:25 PM

But do we really benefit from smartphones?

by weird-eye-issue

8/24/2026 at 3:40:18 PM

As usual, smartphones are an excellent servant but a terrible master. Having a phone, a music player, web browser, camera, gps all in one tiny package? Incredible. Having a machine that lets me doom scroll tiktok for 10 hours straight? Awful.

Same deal with internet, ai, even alcohol. Plenty of benefits with a side risk of ruining your life / brain / life if you lack self control.

by revolvingthrow

8/24/2026 at 3:06:59 PM

Depends how 'we' use them. Society as a whole probably does not benefit because of the severe drawbacks these devices have for those who can't resist the lure of 'social' media and garbage factories like TikTok. Individuals can certainly benefit from having an internet-connected pocket computer which so happens to also be capable of making and receiving phone calls.

by hagbard_c

8/24/2026 at 3:18:23 PM

Is it a net benefit to the user or a consistently equal transaction?

by chucksta

8/24/2026 at 4:28:16 PM

For some - like me - it is certainly a net benefit since there is no real transaction other than me buying the hardware and paying ~€2/month for mobile data/cell service:

- the device is 'Google-free'

- I only use free software

- the thing is firewalled for in- and outgoing traffic, only those applications I approve get to access the net

- I use a 'prepaid' data card, 250 GB valid for 2 years for ~€50 (~€2/month) which I won't use up. Last time I could take along unused data to the next 2 years so nothing is lost.

Here's the 'costs':

- between €120 and €170 for the hardware which tends to last around 8 years, i.e. between €15 and ~€21 per year

- sometimes something breaks (battery, screen, speaker, USB connection board) which I then repair, can be anything between €1 and €40 so let's put the repair costs at €24 per device or €3 per year

- €2/month for data and cell service valid in the whole EU (no roaming costs)

- electricity, comes from the sun -> free

- when the device is on I can be tracked by interested TLAs like any other 4/5G device

- same is true for Bluetooth, not so much for WiFi which is normally off and changes MAC address for every connection.

by hagbard_c

8/24/2026 at 11:29:35 PM

[dead]

by salemh

8/24/2026 at 11:30:25 AM

Let's not conflate "this technology isn't for kids" with "this technology is bad", though. I wouldn't want my kids using a tablet, but I wouldn't want anyone using a gun.

by stavros

8/24/2026 at 12:27:56 PM

don't use != not allowed to use, pretty sure they use them now

by PunchyHamster

8/24/2026 at 9:42:24 AM

Other than the specific phrases like load-bearing etc, I find the biggest tell of all just to be repetition.

Every damn Claude article does the “tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what you told ‘em” routine.

by JSR_FDED

8/24/2026 at 10:51:43 AM

Stiff, repetive style is often a result of very small, less than 0.5 sampling temperature, very small top-k, very high min-p etc. Most of "normies" (wrt to /r/localllama and /r/sillytavernai) never tweak the samplers.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 2:06:26 PM

You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k

The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters

by weird-eye-issue

8/24/2026 at 2:39:31 PM

> You must not be doing much real work with these models, otherwise you would know that with the latest Claude models you can't even adjust the temperature or top p/k

No, I do not. Good for me I guess.

> The real way to actually get a good output has always been in the prompt, not these parameters

What an absurd claim.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 11:00:27 PM

Have fun toying around with your local models and leave the real work to the rest of us buddy

by weird-eye-issue

8/24/2026 at 9:17:13 AM

Ive given up trying to fight claudes language, and Im afraid Im getting used to it and can even understand what claude is saying faster or should I say I can parse it faster now.

by miranaproarrow

8/24/2026 at 9:21:01 AM

gate= some sort of a guard or test

name= a variable name or fields

load bearing= coupled dependencies that can break other things if you change it

by miranaproarrow

8/24/2026 at 10:54:20 AM

While these are clunky, was this phraseology that much of a problem for people? I don't like reading it, but I didn't find that I couldn't read it.

by alex43578

8/24/2026 at 11:26:22 AM

But slowing down to decipher text instead of single pass simple reading is the problem.

Random example from a session I have open:

> *One new failure mode the doubling opens, and how it is closed.* A ring never shrinks. With two 8-byte index words per record instead of one, the ring's doubling comes inside the budget's reach in the blank regime: a doubling taken [...]

It takes extra deciphering cycles to see "the doubling", "budget's reach", "the blank regime", etc. and figure out what it's referring to. I had to read that opening sentence multiple times. At first I parsed it like "One cat the table yawns".

Sometimes it's so encumbered I can't tell what it's saying at the directional level: good or bad, fast or slow? "Your blank regime negated the pre-armed run's dilemma but clawed back the overall metrics."

It's not how I'd phrase things if I were trying to be easily understood, though Claudese is probably great for LLMs due to ad hoc jargon usage.

by hombre_fatal

8/24/2026 at 11:45:18 AM

Oh yeah, those examples are gibberish. Mine hasn't been that bad. More like the comment I responded to, where it's just being a bit clunky. Your examples read like Claude's gone a bit schizo.

by alex43578

8/24/2026 at 2:07:30 PM

I get tripped up on the intensity of its us and the ambiguity it tends to apply them with.

Minor inconvenience != load bearing, yet Claude consistently uses it while missing actual loading bearing things.

Likewise, it tends to jump to terminology that’s technically correct but practically meaningless.

by SkyPuncher

8/24/2026 at 12:28:47 PM

just seeing it too often I'd imagine. I don't really mind it

by PunchyHamster

8/24/2026 at 12:38:30 PM

pinned = forced in some way

tree is green = tests built and ran without error

landed = surprisingly, not "made a commit" but rather "finished the code." It might be confused because we're using Perforce and not git.

by StilesCrisis

8/24/2026 at 12:14:34 PM

invariant = constant

you were right to push back = previous response was wrong

by thih9

8/24/2026 at 11:38:48 AM

Load bearing irks me having a construction background.

Claude will often comment on it using the phrase wrong when it gets context.

by knollimar

8/24/2026 at 10:24:45 AM

[dead]

by ricardobeat

8/24/2026 at 11:24:01 AM

I've spent my spare time in the last _days_ rewriting a pretty small document made in collaboration with Fable. It was reluctant to simplify the proposed design. And the language is so dense - it's almost poetic in nature and concision, but I wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English.

It's an interesting model/tool. Powerful but still chock full of trade-offs. I hope the next model's language is more like e.g. OpenAI models in terms of language use. (oh, and the code comments, yikes).

by andyferris

8/24/2026 at 1:10:34 PM

Claude Code's creative use of language in an engineering context is often quite infuriating. I want language to be as simple as possible, it should be accessible and require as little context as possible. Below are a few examples that Code wrote that I encountered in my own work (related to signal processing):

"excursion" (means: a spike/jump — a value that rises or deviates from baseline, just say spike or outlier)

"legitimate majority-normal baseline" (means: a real majority of normal pixels)

"matched pool of pure-noise ('normal') pixels" (means: the same number of normal pixels, don't bring pools into this)

"ablation" (means: comparing before vs. after — turning a thing on/off to see what changes)

I actually used Claude Code to try and find examples like these but not entirely unexpectedly it had a very hard time detecting these, even though I encounter them like every other sentence. I can imagine this style is great when writing prose, not so much when writing documentation.

Similarly, I tried using Claude Design to make some slides, and the individual slides were fine, but just about every other slide it used different words to denote the same concept, which I would say is the fastest way to lose your audience.

by PatronBernard

8/24/2026 at 12:06:04 PM

> wanted a clear discourse about a complex topic with people whose native language is not English.

Did you try specifically telling it that? I haven't used Fable but I do write lots of docs for a non native audience and I get good results from stating that.

by esperent

8/24/2026 at 11:46:08 AM

I don't see why Anthropic would be expected to publish default Claude voice or use Claude for their public writing. No matter how great AI is, it doesn't commit you to using it for everything.

And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".

When you read a blog post with Claude voice, you're seeing the result of someone who couldn't even be bothered to do that which is why they deserve extra lashings.

by hombre_fatal

8/24/2026 at 12:19:57 PM

> And they probably know basic LLM tricks like "write it in the style of X".

You can probably get it to do a surface-level impression of Mark Twain that way, but from what I've heard, it's not that easy to prompt Claude out of the "voice" described in the article for technical writing, and all existing methods, like asking it to ELI5 or tropes.fyi, only have partial success.

by rossy

8/24/2026 at 12:25:56 PM

For a single document like a blog post it should be easy, though you don't have to sub a famous author in for X.

There are all sorts of ways to do it though, like pointing it to an example doc.

by hombre_fatal

8/24/2026 at 10:49:14 AM

There are many different ways to make an LLM sound more human-like (the author has actually explicitly mentioned ChatGPT sounds more natural). For their public announcements etc. they might as well used specially trained small 24-32B creative writing model or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku. One could also use "antislop" samplers, maybe some encoder-decoder unslopping postprocessing small models etc. Or they simply may have been written by humans.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 10:52:41 AM

> or put a LoRA on top of their Haiku

Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?

by swiftcoder

8/24/2026 at 10:59:56 AM

> Are there any creative-writing LORAs published for open-weight models?

Oddly enough standalone LoRA adapters are very popular in image generation world and utterly unpopular in LLM world - there it is customary just to distribute fully merged models on HF.

Having said that I personally use a finetune of Qwen 3.6, Qwen3.6-27B-Fable-Fusion-711-Uncensored-Heretic, which was was not designed for creative writing per se but is far better than any other 24B-32B model I've tried for writing, let alone awful vanilla Qwen 3.6.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 11:58:42 AM

Interesting use case, with so many finetune available at HF, how you determine a good models?

by BOOSTERHIDROGEN

8/24/2026 at 12:29:16 PM

/r/localllama, /r/sillytavernai for leads and then personal vibe check.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 12:44:18 PM

Why would they use Haiku for anything? They aren't paying for the tokens.

by StilesCrisis

8/24/2026 at 12:56:04 PM

> Why would they use Haiku for anything?

Good enough for essentially blogposts? Easier to finetune?

> They aren't paying for the tokens.

They are paying for electricity, though.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 3:20:25 PM

The electricity cost is a rounding error compared to the cost of putting out a press release which makes them look incompetent.

by StilesCrisis

8/24/2026 at 4:05:24 PM

As I said, why would you use and finetune (burning lots of electrcity, not rounding error) Sonnet if you can cheaply tune Haiku? Press releases do not need advanced skills from LLMs.

by BoredomIsFun

8/24/2026 at 9:14:30 AM

whats troubling here is that one of the anthropic devs on twitter or github don't seem to acknowledge this issue, If they don't acknowledge there's nothing for them to fix

by miranaproarrow

8/24/2026 at 9:59:44 AM

I do really enjoy the style of their blogposts, they remind me of the Cloudflare postmortems. Wish their models could produce it.

Not sure I agree about e.g. GPT not sounding this formulaic though, imo it definitely does.

I don't actually have a problem with the common terms Claude emits, I think they're appropriate for a coding agent. But I do find them overused.

by perching_aix

8/24/2026 at 9:07:19 AM

On the bright side, I'll know immediately a post is Claude-generated. If the author didn't bother writing it, I don't bother reading it.

/s?

by wiradikusuma

8/24/2026 at 9:32:03 AM

This is where the concern-trolls barge in with "what about non native English speakers using AI to blogslop everything is actually a good tool!"

by reddozen

8/24/2026 at 1:36:07 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45

8/24/2026 at 1:33:33 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45