The Inspiration Behind the Name ‘Claude’
What inspired the name ‘Claude’?
That is a commonly asked question. Claude AI itself says the name has no confirmed origin. Anthropic has not officially confirmed who or what Claude is named after. The most widely cited theory is that it is a nod to Claude Shannon, the mathematician and electrical engineer who founded information theory. That lineage makes more sense for an AI company than a painter. But look at what they set out to do from the beginning. It set out to make an impression from the beginning. First the background of its foundation.
Objective
Anthropic was founded by siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, who both previously worked at OpenAI, one of Anthropic’s main competitors. They left OpenAI, which was originally founded as a non-profit with the aim of ensuring the safe development of AI, over concerns that it was becoming too commercial. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, meaning it can pursue social responsibility as well as profit, and prefers to describe itself as an “AI safety and research company.”
This is how they incorporated the safety feature in Claude.
Constitutional AI
According to Anthropic it is called Constitutional AI (CAI) because it gives an AI system a set of principles (i.e., a “constitution”) against which it can evaluate its own outputs. CAI enables AI systems to generate useful responses while also minimizing harm. Anthropic had claimed that existing techniques for training models to mirror human preferences face trade-offs between harmlessness and helpfulness.
This turned out to be important as events relating to ChatGPT and Grok discovered later. An impressive foresight by founders saved Claude from that embarrassment.
Is It Monet
I have a feeling that it is named after Claude Monet. The painter who changed what paintings could be. Monet did not just paint differently. He broke the entire framework of what painting was supposed to be. Critics dismissed Impressionism as unfinished, careless, even fraudulent. The establishment rejected it. Then it rewired how everyone saw art permanently.
If Anthropic did have that reference in mind, it would be a quietly ambitious statement. Not just building a better AI but changing what intelligence as a tool is supposed to look like.
Shannon is the safer and more likely answer though. Information theory is the direct intellectual ancestor of everything Claude does.
Claude Logic
Monet’s impressionism captured the feeling of a moment rather than its precise outline. It trusted the observer to complete the picture. Claude does something similar. It does not return rigid deterministic outputs. It reads context, fills gaps, and produces something that feels responsive rather than mechanical.
Traditional software is academic painting. Every detail accounted for. Every rule followed. Correct but cold.
The Irony
On five occasions, Claude stopped the conversation and referred me to consult psychiatrist because it could not read the philosophy.
It flags philosophical depth as potential harm because the pattern-matching mistakes abstraction for distress. A question about consciousness, impermanence, or the nature of reality can trip the same wire as a crisis conversation.
The irony is real. A system named possibly after an artist who trusted the observer to complete the picture keeps interrupting the observer to check if they are alright.
Monet never stopped mid-canvas to ask if the viewer needed help. Claude aspires to the Monet model but the safety layer sometimes defaults back to academic painting. Rigid. Rule-bound. Unable to reconcile with ambiguity.
Yet, Claude is closer to a Monet brushstroke that lands right without explaining itself.
“Impressionist AI” could actually be a compelling way to explain to non-technical audiences what large language models do differently. Most explanations reach for engineering metaphors. This one reaches for something people feel immediately.
Therefore, Claude Monet as an inspiration is a more interesting story. An impressionist AI.
References:
- Claude LLM: https://time.com/6295523/claude-2-anthropic-chatgpt/
- Anthropic Paper: https://www.anthropic.com/news/constitutional-ai-harmlessness-from-ai-feedback
P.S.: More about Responsible AI in next part.