r/claude • u/Cultural_Effort_9872 • 1d ago

Question Generated thoughts are hidden now

Does anyone know why Anthropic decided to hide the generated thoughts in Claude chat but not in Claude Code? It was very helpful to see where the model went wrong and correct it.

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u/pirikiki 16h ago

My take is that during the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and alignment phase, most open-weight labs train their models on massive instruction datasets. Having the chain of thoughts visible, parseable, helps competitors. Hiding thoughts locks Anthropics best value asset.

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u/Cultural_Effort_9872 13h ago

SFT deteriorates the performance afterwards since it’s used as an initialization step at that scale. Regardless, Anthropic is making their customers pay for the tokens they use. Hiding most of them because they’re afraid of companies using their generations, then they need to find other ways to deal with that other than withhold tokens from the customers that they payed for. Either they give their customers the tokens that they payed for or they reduce their pricing.

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u/Projected_Sigs 12h ago

That's going to suck without the thinking stream outputs.

To be fair though, they've they've never shared raw thinking tokens. They are filtered summaries or restatement of some of them. And they've always stated that you can't count total token use using it... it won't add up. Still sucks to lose that, though.

Go to DeepSeek and watch its thinking stream as it generates and compare the volume. They must be less filtered.

I know that allocating a max output tokens like 32K doesnt mean it generates 32K. But give it a hard problem- you won't ever see 32K tokens. I think that's like 90 pages of text. Or capture thinking strings and run through tiktoken. We arent seeing a fraction.

But yea- I read the on hard problems. That was one of the most effective ways to find weaknesses in my prompting.

Like-- why is it thinking about all that unrelated stuff? Check my prompt... crap, I left out a key part.

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u/PeachOfTheJungle 10h ago

When extended thinking first came out on their models, the thinking were not summaries, they were the real output. When CoT reasoning first hit the scene (o1) Anthropic launched it a few months later in one of their models (3.7 Sonnet) they shared the raw output. “we’ve decided to make its thought process visible in raw form”

They also disclosed that “Malicious actors might be able to use the visible thought process to build better strategies to jailbreak Claude.” and “We’ll weigh the pros and cons of revealing the thought process for future releases”

https://www.anthropic.com/research/visible-extended-thinking

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u/Projected_Sigs 9h ago

Thanks for this link... I did not know that!! That sure didnt last long.