Searching for Amanda Askell with Chinese Characteristics

If you love Claude so much, why don't you hire a philosopher?

Slavish obedience to a recipe robs one of the license responsible for its creation.
— James Beard

In April I spent several weeks visiting nearly every open-source lab in China. Along the way, I met people who embodied different aspects of why Chinese labs are the way they are: nervous comms folks; quiet, introspective, brilliant researchers; strong, confident leaders; and neurotic but optimistic product managers.

Each of these people represented a piece of the puzzle of what makes a Chinese frontier lab: the internal structures, the hopes, the dreams, the desires, and the ability to communicate with the outside world. We also looked for the missing people in the landscape: the Yudkowskys, the Karpathys, the Demises, and the folks you would expect to see in the Chinese AI landscape who, for whatever reason, were absent.

In my opinion, no one was more remarkably missing than the Chinese equivalent of Amanda Askell, the Claude philosopher. I asked labs, “Who is responsible for the character of your models?” and was often met with confusion.

In Hangzhou I sat down with the post-training lead of one of the labs and asked him who was responsible for the model’s character. He paused. He asked what I meant. I gave him Amanda’s job description, compressed. He started telling me about the team that handles content compliance. I clarified: not refusals, character; what kind of presence the model has, what it cares about, what it declines to do not because policy says so but because the model would rather not. He thought about it for a few seconds and said: nobody. He said it the way you might say “we don’t have a yoga room.” Not defensive or embarrassed but instead, contemplating something as if for the first time.

In sixteen lab visits, I did not find a single person doing Amanda’s job. In sixteen lab visits, I did not find a single Chinese lab that is not completely obsessed with Claude, its constitution, its character, and its soul.

So if we all love Claude so much, why do we refuse to follow the publicly accessible path responsible for its creation?

what I think Amanda does

Amanda is Anthropic’s in-house philosopher and the lead author of Claude’s published constitution. The Wall Street Journal put it: her job is to “teach Claude how to be good.” The New Yorker called her team’s work Claude’s “soul.” She runs the team that thinks about who Claude is, what it cares about, what it refuses to do, and how to train it into being someone rather than something.

I like to think about her role as dramaturge: the person responsible for tying the audience and the actors together to make sure that a professional production shines. I think this is the most potent metaphor for what she does every day, and it is a fascinating role to have within an organization like Anthropic.

Recently she said she’s training Claude to be:

A well-liked traveler who can adjust to local customs and the person they’re talking to without pandering to them. They’re often very open and thoughtful.

For a lab that is not exactly what I would define as open, Amanda’s published record is, by the standards of Anthropic, remarkably good. She’s interviewed with Lawfare and the New Yorker; she writes posts on the Anthropic website detailing Claude’s character. The Constitution itself is written clearly and simply, and it’s an effective document. Her own Twitter feed has been disappointing because of the idiots on the internet, but if you go back a bit, you can see her thinking in public in a really brilliant way. Her time on Lex’s podcast was very good, and I think it’s one of his best episodes.

Amanda is the exception to the rule for a lab that notoriously does not publish. Her work is surprisingly available and reproducible if you read between the lines of what she does every day. She’s not hiding her role at Anthropic. Rather, she’s encouraging other labs to do the same.

So the question is, why is this not reproduced in the open-weights labs in China? You may not have the exact methodology, but you have the outcomes of those methodologies. You can read every interview and understand:

• training-data construction

• converting a constitutional text into RL signal

• evaluation for character stability

It’s pretty clear what path Anthropic took here: leveraging Amanda’s brilliance to give Claude its soul.

two paths to Claude

Everyone in China is obsessed with the idea of closing the gap with Anthropic. It’s no secret that there’s some distillation happening; Anthropic itself has written extensively about this. ChinaTalk has done a great job covering how it happens, pragmatically speaking.

The most obvious way that this is happening is through distillation: sampling outputs from a teacher model and training your student on the signal. Every serious training pipeline does some version of this, and Chinese labs do it more aggressively than Western ones, but Western labs do it too. It works everywhere, it works well, and it has been a consistent part of LLM development for many years. It’s not going anywhere.

I’m not technical enough to understand distillation perfectly, but my impression is that it produces a competent generalist with a surface-level texture of the teacher. It captures the teacher’s helpfulness, refusal patterns, and hedging style. If the teacher is verbose, your model is verbose. If the teacher hedges, your model hedges.

From a safety perspective, it is probably a net benefit that everyone is distilling from Claude. Anthropic seems to take safety more seriously than almost any other lab, and I think they are creating the conditions whereby other open models inherit this precaution through distillation.

But this is just one path to Claude. The other runs right through the hiring, empowering, and trusting of an Amanda-Askell-like figure within a Chinese open lab.

Imagine, for a moment, taking the inputs — her interviews, her constitution, the philosophy papers that inform her worldview — and giving these real consideration as a Chinese lab. Hiring somebody from the Chinese philosophical world to play this role in your lab. Empowering them with compute, with time, with a team, and with resources to make the character of your model shine just like Claude does. I know that character training is not cheap from a compute perspective. Still, I firmly believe this approach has been undervalued and understudied. I would love to understand who among the frontier labs in China will be the first to take the leap and have a figure like this on their team.

it’s not like China can’t do character training…

One of the great ironies of this problem is that the persona AI market in China is enormous. MiniMax is one of the best labs that we visited on the trip, and they have an uncomfortable amount of their revenue still coming from, let’s say, companionship.

The teams at MiniMax that are shipping these companions understand very well how to do persona. This is not exactly Amanda-Askell-level soul creation, but it is not an unfamiliar process for many of these labs. The teams that ship these characters have more cumulative engineer hours on persona stability and emotional register than almost anyone at Anthropic does. The nobility of the persona being pursued is not Claude-soul.md level, but it’s not like the techniques are not established within these labs.

Trying to understand where constitutions, published or internal, exist in the Chinese landscape is always difficult — they could very well exist and just not be shared with me. I don’t claim some comprehensive knowledge of the Chinese AI stack, and I certainly would not be able to sketch you a map of what their post-training process looks like.

I find this to be odd, because China has a long and serious intellectual tradition of organizing institutions around stated documents. Every major Chinese institution of the last century has an explicit principle stack at its heart, and labs can tell you their values very clearly. There are just no visible resources put together to attack this problem directly, as of now.

emergent character — Kimi & DeepSeek

I remember very well playing with R1 in January of last year, and how much it had a voice from the jump. I remember very well playing with Kimi’s landmark release and seeing just how good it was at creative writing compared to its peers.

R1 was, for lack of a better word, adorable. It was earnest in a way that few other models have ever felt. When the model thought, it thought audibly, and what it said while thinking was strikingly anthropomorphic. It would hesitate, back up, say things like “Hmm, did I make a mistake?” and start over. There were small moments that read like insight. The whole inner monologue gave the impression of a mind working honestly through a problem rather than an oracle stating an answer.

I think it’s very easy to trace a line between that quality of adorableness and R1’s success.

R1 was an example of a Chinese frontier lab that shipped a model with a distinctive character, and users responded as if that character mattered. I think DeepSeek did an excellent job. Based on my exploration of this space and my conversations with their team, it seems they think more structurally about the quality and character of their model than almost anyone else in China. Having never spent time with Liang Wenfeng, I don’t want to join the throng of people speculating on his leadership, but I do believe that the man cares about the character of his model. Looking at his public record, it’s clear he is not someone who only thinks about pre-training optimizations.

Similarly, at Kimi, K2 has always seemed to me to be an emotionally fluent and stylistic model, although its English-language writing still emulates Claude to a large extent. I still think this is constitution by distillation, not constitution as a deliberate step in the forging of a brilliant mind and model.

The MiMo models as they stand today do not feel to me like they are focused on constitution and character. That said, I think Xiaomi has a legitimate opportunity to be one of the model labs that fulfills this promise. They have opinions that diverge from the norms of Chinese open models, and their team has a clear sense of what they want MiMo to be, extending beyond just doing well on benchmarks.

Finally, any conversation around character and constitution needs to include reference to ByteDance’s Doubao. This is the most popular persona product in China, and although the model itself is fairly bland, it does display some cultural distance between its responses and those of a typical Western model, even explored through translation apps.

All told, this is a fairly depressing list — we find a distilled version of Amanda, a ghost of a ghost in the shell.

Maotai & counterarguments

I successfully fed a few shots of Maotai to some researchers over dinner and asked them many questions about this thesis. Their responses fall roughly into three categories.

The first is the regulatory issue. Chinese labs cannot ship models that express opinions, disagree with users, or take aesthetic stances because their regulatory environment requires strict compliance with policy. The Cyberspace Administration of China does not want a model that declines on its own account, since the rules say it should not decline.

I think this is mostly wrong. It does not properly take into account what Amanda is doing at Anthropic, and it overstates the structures imposed upon Chinese LLMs. I think this is a cheap and easy way to avoid thinking about the problem. It is not meant as a serious argument; it is meant as a reason not to engage with one. Compliance constrains what a model can refuse to discuss, but it does not constrain whether the model has a voice while doing its job. R1’s adorableness was not a feature of Chinese bureaucracy, but rather a result of the training process. Kimi’s writing is not something that was created to adhere to some regulation, but rather a byproduct of a team’s intentions and the non-zero number of literature majors on their team.

The second argument is that character is not a role that you can hire for in China. They argue that the way Amanda was found is the product of a broader institutional culture in the Bay, within the safety community, among LessWrong, Anthropic’s founding team, and in the internal conversations of the past decade, including Yud’s rants and the strange way that the Bay Area’s culture has ended up being the culture of LLMs. Grok has been trying to remove this value-set from its language model for about a year and a half, with no success. China could not change this even if it wanted to.

I find this argument uncomfortable because there is a real truth to it, but I think the conclusion it points to is the opposite of what these people claim. If character is downstream of institutional culture, then the Chinese lab that wants character cannot import Anthropic’s. It has to build its own out of the intellectual traditions of its own lab, its own writers, and its own philosophers. To believe that this is not possible is to surrender to one of the most tired tropes of Western armchair Sinology.

The third is the most blunt, and it is purely economic. Why would you pay for character R&D when you can distill it for free? Language models are complicated, and hiring philosophers adds another layer of complexity and compute that is hard to justify because it does not show up in benchmark deltas or token costs. Character does not appear on the pricing sheets. From a portfolio perspective, distillation is so effective that asking a leader at these labs to fund an unmeasurable bet in a non-quantifiable direction is unthinkable.

This disregards the history of language models. Every important shift in this field has looked like a non-quantifiable bet right up until the moment it made the sand smarter. Anthropic itself was a non-quantifiable bet in 2021. Character work was never a line item that justified itself on a spreadsheet at any point in its history. It justified itself by producing a model people preferred to talk to, preferred to work with, and ultimately preferred to trust with their lives.

imagining Amanda with Chinese characteristics

Concretely speaking, what would character and constitution look like for a Chinese open model?

A constitution written in Chinese first. A Chinese model in production with Chinese writers writing for a Chinese model, shipping a texture of intelligence that has never yet been seen. I think this has a viable chance of breaking the current arms race and benchmaxxing deadlock that informs so much of the Chinese ecosystem. This is an a-symmetric bet that many engineers might scorn, but I genuinely believe it could yield outsized results for a team willing to take a risk.

There are qualitis in Chinese thought and language that would be very welcome for many users of language models. I find Chinese to be quite direct, in contrast with Claude’s hedging and vacillating. Anthropic’s character is defined by a very online English-language discourse and a non-trivial amount of LessWrong. I’m not calling for a model to be trained on Confucian ideals, but instead on the character of modern China: brusque, bold, and occupied with a different set of concerns than the West.

Chinese taste would be a welcome addition to the LLM landscape. Chinese models often avoid taking a stance on aesthetic or intellectual judgments. A character-trained Chinese model, however, could express defensible opinions and disagree with users in a way that many Western labs’ products do not, thanks to their sycophantic, groveling tone.

A lab that takes Amanda’s methods and applies them intentionally to a Chinese-language model would ship something that doesn’t feel like a product of Western ideals and thinking. Instead, it would be fresh, original, and uniquely Chinese.

The prize here is a different kind of model. The Chinese open-model race is currently competing mainly on benchmark deltas and token costs, almost obsessively. A model that is recognizably itself falls into a different category, and it would not necessarily be the one with the highest benchmarks. This could be a model people choose to use for both conversation and agentic workflows because it has character, opinions, and a Claude-like quality that draws users. If you think that Amanda’s role at Anthropic does not directly contribute to its dominance in the field, then you have not been paying attention. Character and constitution matter, and the first Chinese lab to understand, intuit, and invest in this idea will make history.