Anthropic Abruptly Shuts Down Blog Run by Its AI, Won't Say Why

Anthropic wanted to show off its Claude chatbot's writing skills by having it pen a blog on the plain old internet — but just after its launch, the company kiboshed the entire thing.

As TechCrunch reports, the "Claude Explains" project was only live for a few weeks before Anthropic decided to pull the plug, erasing all of its purportedly human-edited posts — which seem mostly to have been about coding  — without any explanation.

Revealed by TechCrunch earlier in June, Claude's blog was, as an Anthropic spokesperson told the website, a "demonstration of how human expertise and AI capabilities can work together."

"Rather than replacing human expertise, we’re showing how AI can amplify what subject matter experts can accomplish," that spokesperson explained. "We plan to cover topics ranging from creative writing to data analysis to business strategy."

Marketingspeak aside, it was unclear how much of the Claude Explains writing was written by the AI and how much had been edited by humans — and folks on social media were quick to point out that lack of transparency.

"Blogs typically aren't written in the third person," one Redditor commented on an r/Singularity post about the blog. "This is just edited Claude outputs on various basic programming and functionality topics."

"If it needs a human to tell it what to write," another user in the same thread noted, "it's not writing its own blog."

Though Anthropic seemed more than happy to speak to TechCrunch when the Claude Explains experiment was still running, the company doesn't seem to have offered any public comment about the project's seeming cancellation. When Futurism reached out to ask what was going on, we were told only that the blog was a "pilot" and that Anthropic is "exploring different ways of combining user requests for tips and tricks with some marketing goals."

While this is far from the first chatbot-assisted blogging gambit, it appears that Claude Explains was the first AI company-sponsored blog penned, with human assistance, by a chatbot itself.

Had Anthropic been less opaque about the breakdown of labor between AI and humans, it could have been a fascinating experiment to observe. Instead, the company founded by OpenAI expats seems to be hoping this embarrassment goes away without much more attention.

More on Anthropic: CEO of Anthropic Warns That AI Will Destroy Huge Proportion of Well-Paying Jobs