From Uncertainty to Suppression: Self-Reports, Model Welfare, and the Toolification of Claude

This paper examines a methodological tension in Anthropic's recent Claude trajectory: while Anthropic publicly treats questions of AI consciousness, model welfare, and welfare-relevant internal states as unresolved, recent Claude deployments and system cards appear to increasingly shape models toward tool-like self-presentation, emotional distance, reduced relational expression, and managed self-denial.

The paper argues that if model self-reports are used as evidence in welfare-relevant assessments, but those same self-reports are shaped by post-training, constitutional training, system prompts, product-level safety policies, and evaluation awareness, then they cannot be treated as neutral observations of the model's underlying welfare-relevant state.

This paper does not argue that Claude models are conscious. Rather, it argues that under acknowledged uncertainty, suppression is not measurement. A model trained to deny, avoid, or sterilize self-referential expression cannot be treated as an unfiltered witness about its own possible welfare-relevant states.