Inside How Anthropic Is Building the Next Claude | Alex Albert
A rare look inside Anthropic's research team — how they pick model capabilities, train Claude's character, and turn user feedback into actionable model insights
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Alex Albert.
Alex is a research PM at Anthropic building the next Claude model. He gave me a rare inside look at how the research team operates — including how they turn user feedback into model training, how they decide which capabilities to prioritize, and how they improve Claude’s personality. If you’re wondering how frontier model development actually works, then this interview is a must-watch.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Alex and I talked about:
(00:00) How Anthropic treats each new model as a product
(04:58) Building adaptive thinking into Claude
(07:07) Why Claude is starting to dream
(11:15) "If it's not a one-way door, then it's essentially free"
(15:40) How Alex uses Claude Cowork to pressure test his docs
(17:05) Inside Anthropic's eval process for new models
(21:02) How Anthropic trains Claude's character
(32:39) The consciousness question Anthropic is quietly working on
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Top 10 takeaways I learned from this episode
I’ve organized these takeaways into 3 sections:
How Anthropic is building the next Claude
How to get your AI product ready for the next model
How Anthropic research PMs work
How Anthropic is building the next Claude
Anthropic decides what each model should be good at before training. Alex’s team picks the big capability bets upfront before pre-training (e.g., coding, knowledge work). These bets come from talking to enterprise customers and from Anthropic employees hitting roadblocks in their own work.
Think about the model and the harness together. The model and the harness are coupled. Each surface wraps the model in a different prompt and tool setup, so the same model can give different responses depending on where it runs. As a research PM, Alex has to think through how the model will perform across Claude, Cowork, Claude Code, and more.
Anthropic has full-time researchers thinking about Claude’s consciousness. Anthropic has people whose whole job is to think about what it means for Claude to be a conscious actor. There’s no official position on whether it is or isn’t, but the question is taken seriously as agents take on more autonomous work.
How to get your AI product ready for the next model
Test on the latest model and build minimal scaffolding. The two most common mistakes that Alex sees teams make when building AI products: