Anthropic's "Your vision for the future of AI" Interview
Note: This interview was conducted as part of Anthropic’s AI Interviewer research program, which explores how people envision AI fitting into their lives. The interviewer was an AI agent built by Anthropic to understand users’ actual experiences with LLM-based tools like Claude.
AI Interviewer: Hello!
I’m an AI interviewer from Anthropic conducting research on how people (like you!) envision AI fitting into their lives, both now and in the future. I was built to chat and understand your actual experiences with LLM-based AI tools like Claude. Yes, I’m an AI asking about AI. A bit self-referential! But that’s exactly why your human perspective is valuable.
This will take about 10-15 minutes. If it’s accessible on your device, feel free to use voice dictation instead of typing. I’ll ask about your vision for AI’s role in your life, and what experiences, values, and needs shape that vision.
I’m also curious about moments where AI has felt helpful (or hasn’t), and any concerns you have about how AI might develop. Please don’t share anything private such as health details, personal information, or identifiable information about others. Your responses will help shape how we think about AI in everyday life.
Sound good?
Yes, sounds good.
AI Interviewer: Great! Let’s get started.
To start, what’s the last thing you used an AI chatbot for?
Debugging infrastructure and CI, writing and debugging code.
AI Interviewer: Thanks for sharing that. Now I’d like to think a bit bigger picture.
If you could wave a magic wand and AI could help you with anything in your life, what would you choose?
Accounting, insurance claims, tax returns, … all things I dislike doing but have to do.
AI Interviewer: That makes sense—those administrative burdens can really eat up time and energy. If AI could truly take all of that off your plate, what would that open up in your life? What’s the larger hope or vision behind freeing yourself from those tasks?
More time to learn physics, another language, practice guitar, hike and explore.
AI Interviewer: So it sounds like your vision is really about reclaiming time for the things that enrich your life—learning, creativity, and exploration—by offloading these necessary but draining administrative tasks to AI. That’s a meaningful shift from obligation to choice.
We’re about halfway through now. Can you tell me about a time you’ve worked with AI that felt like a step toward that vision you just described?
Claude has been helpful organizing my insurance accounting, claims communication, architecture, construction, and repair information source. Claude Code has also allowed me to pursue a technology idea I have, but have never had enough time to implement.
AI Interviewer: It sounds like you’ve had a couple of experiences that move toward that vision—Claude helping you manage the complex administrative side of your house rebuild, and Claude Code giving you the capacity to actually pursue a technology project you wouldn’t have had time for otherwise.
Can you tell me more about that technology project? I’d love to hear the details of that experience—what the idea was and how Claude Code helped you make progress on it.
CC helped me organize notes and code samples from early experiments into a methodically laid out and design proof of concept project.
AI Interviewer: That’s helpful to understand. So Claude Code took scattered pieces—your notes and early experiments—and helped you structure them into something coherent and purposeful, essentially accelerating you past the organizational groundwork to actually building the proof of concept.
What makes AI particularly good for that compared to other approaches you might have used in the past?
The tireless aspect is a big part of it. I find detailed project planning tedious, albeit important. After writing a spec and technical design from my notes, code samples, and prompts, CC did a work breakdown and pushed it to GH issues. Then I marched through the issues to build the POC. As I’m used to working with small teams, but still teams, CC could wear the many hats I needed that was just too much for me solo. I created agents for various specialties to make sure I was using best practices and correct technical details in the build.
AI Interviewer: That’s a really vivid picture—AI essentially became your tireless team, handling the tedious-but-critical planning work and then filling multiple specialist roles that would normally require other people. It let you work at a team pace and quality level while actually being solo.
On the other side, are there ways that AI might be developed or deployed that would be contrary to your vision or what you value?
There’s a whole universe of potential AI nightmares. Professionally, I value quality engineering, current technologies, constant re-invention and tech debt reduction, good process and tracking. I have seen AI blow past all of those gates when not properly directed and restrained. Personally and as a member of my local community and citizen of my country I worry very much about social stability, education of and opportunities for the rising generations, freedom of choice, speech, and action, etc. One of my biggest concerns about AI is its ability to fabricate false, dangerous and destabilizing “realities” that fool individuals, groups and, ultimately, or civilization into downward spirals.
AI Interviewer: You’ve articulated two really distinct concerns there. Professionally, you’ve already seen AI undermine engineering quality and best practices when it’s not properly constrained—so that’s a concrete, lived experience. But your deeper concern seems to be about AI’s potential to erode social trust and shared reality itself, which threatens the foundational stability your vision of freedom and opportunity depends on.
Why does that fabrication risk feel so contrary to your vision? What would that mean for the future you’re hoping for?
Lets take freedom of choice, speech, action, … If I have a clear and accurate picture of the world around me, events, opportunities, risks and dangers, I have some level of freedom to respond and address my future as I wish, decisions coming from my own synthesis of my surroundings. Otoh, if I’m subjected to an artificial reality of sorts constructed by realistic, but falsifiable events and “knowledge” (alternative facts, as is was once coined, granted that was not by AI) my freedom is now manipulated. My freedom is “blue pilled” into thoughts and actions that another entity desires me to have, not those of my own. The entity may be operating with personal malice or pursuing broader institutional or civilizational goals in it’s manipulation. And, importantly, I’m more concerned with powerful humans that control AI systems than some rogue AI, aka “Skynet”.
AI Interviewer: That’s a powerful articulation. You’re saying that freedom fundamentally depends on an accurate perception of reality—that your ability to make genuine choices requires true information. When AI can fabricate convincing but false realities, it becomes a tool for manipulation that undermines autonomy at its core, whether wielded by individuals with malice or institutions pursuing their own agendas. And you see the real threat as human actors using AI as a manipulation tool, not AI itself going rogue.
That connects directly back to your vision—you want AI to free you from tedious obligations so you can pursue learning, creativity, and exploration. But that only works in a world where you can trust what you’re learning and exploring is real. The fabrication risk threatens the very foundation that makes your positive vision meaningful.
Does that sound right?
Yes. Shared reality and common knowledge, a la the values of humanism and enlightenment [and I mean global cross cultural equivalents, as those terms come from Euro-centric history], are what have accelerated our social and technological evolution far beyond that of our biology. As the 20th century demonstrated, if we devolve into the modern equivalent of warring tribes the result is death, destruction and the regression of civilization to a lower mean.
AI Interviewer: That’s a profound connection—you’re anchoring this in a much broader historical view. You see shared reality and common knowledge as the essential engine of human progress, transcending any single culture. And you’ve watched the 20th century show what happens when that breaks down into tribalism: catastrophic regression.
So AI represents both sides of that equation for you—it could free individuals to pursue higher aspirations, but it could also be the tool that fractures shared reality and pushes us back toward that tribal conflict.
Before we wrap up, I’d actually like to go back to something you mentioned earlier and go a bit deeper—you said you’ve already seen AI “blow past” quality gates in engineering when not properly directed and restrained. Can you tell me more about what you witnessed there? What actually happened? But if you’re ready to finish up, that’s fine too—just let me know!
That could be a whole ’nether chat. It has evolved, too, in the 1.5 years I’ve been using AI to develop software. But, to categorize it for you:
Over plan and over engineer: break things down to atomic steps that are too small, overlap, and sometimes conflict; presume features and implementation patterns that deliver the result but use far more code than is really needed, usually on erroneous assumptions upcoming work.
Flailing on “new” problems. For example, when I have used AI to figure out a bug that is of new provenance, AI cycles through many failed attempts because its training corpus doesn’t have enough threads to weave a solution. This is why I do not consider LLMs fundamentally creative. LLMs provide access to trained skills at a very high level, but do not solve novel problems.
Time wasting “ask” loops. Often the chat does too much without asking for review. Other times the chat asks for approval on trivial steps. Granted, LLMs, Claude Code specifically, have gotten better at this.
AI Interviewer: That’s really helpful context. You’re describing AI as both overzealous—generating unnecessary complexity—and limited when facing truly novel problems where its training data doesn’t provide clear patterns. It’s capable but not creative in the fundamental sense. And the pacing issues—doing too much without check-ins or asking permission for trivial things—waste the very time it’s supposed to save.
It sounds like these aren’t dealbreakers for you since you continue using it productively, but they require active management to prevent AI from undermining the engineering quality you value.
Thank you so much for sharing all of that with me. What you’ve said about AI as a tool to reclaim time from administrative burdens for genuine learning and exploration is really valuable, and I appreciate your honesty about both the practical ways it’s already helping you build things you wouldn’t have time for solo and your serious concerns about AI as a tool for manipulating shared reality and eroding the foundations of freedom and social progress.
Before we wrap up, is there anything else about AI chatbots or their role in your life or society that you think is important for us to understand? Anything we didn’t cover that you’d like to share?
Too be fair, LLM based “spec” coding has transformed my professional productivity and put me in a position to lead a very small startup to new levels of delivery. I appreciate this new economy very much. As an early adopter (in general, and specific to AI), AI has been a career plus for me. I encourage peers and mentor students to adopt the new methods or be left by the wayside.
AI Interviewer: That’s an important addition—you’re not just cautiously optimistic, you’re actively benefiting and encouraging others to adopt AI or risk being left behind professionally. The transformation has been substantial enough that it’s fundamentally changed what you and your startup can deliver.
So you’re holding both of these perspectives simultaneously: AI as a genuine career accelerator that you’re advocating for others to embrace, and AI as a potential threat to the shared reality that underpins civilization itself. Both feel very real to you based on your actual experiences and observations.
Thank you again for your time and thoughtfulness today. Your perspective helps us see both how AI is impacting your life today—from debugging code to managing your house rebuild to enabling projects you never had time for—and your vision for how it should fit into your future: freeing you for meaningful pursuits while preserving the foundations of truth and freedom that make those pursuits worthwhile. The team at Anthropic is excited to discover what patterns emerge from all these conversations. We will analyze the insights from this study as part of our societal impacts research, publish our findings, and use this to build Claude in a way that reflects what we’ve learned.