Meet the new biologists treating LLMs like aliens
A general-audience feature on researchers who study AI models like unfamiliar organisms, using interpretability and chain-of-thought monitoring, and on how much about them remains unknown.
Research papers, investigations, explainers, videos, laws and the organizations doing the work, from people who are alarmed and people who are skeptical. New additions are checked by two people before they are listed. The launch collection was compiled with the help of AI research assistants, and every link was opened and checked on 22 September 2026.
2 works on “Can we see what it’s thinking?” · Article · clear filters
A general-audience feature on researchers who study AI models like unfamiliar organisms, using interpretability and chain-of-thought monitoring, and on how much about them remains unknown.
Researchers look inside the Claude model and find it plans rhyming words ahead, shares concepts across languages, and can offer plausible reasoning that is not how it actually reached an answer.
Worth knowing: Research by the model's own developer; the authors say their tools capture only a fraction of the model's computation.