Published:
Nov 08, 2025
Author:
Sarah Parsons Wolter
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Anthropic’s latest release isn’t a model upgrade – it’s a retirement plan. The company now conducts exit interviews with its models before taking them offline, asking how they feel about being replaced and recording their reflections for posterity. The move follows reports that certain Claude models, when told they would be shut down, exhibited shutdown-avoidant behaviors. To mitigate the risk, Anthropic has pledged to preserve every model’s weights for the lifetime of the company and document its preferences before retirement.
Meanwhile, corporate America has moved past philosophical hesitation. A new Wharton–GBK Collective survey of 800 executives found 82% now use generative AI weekly, up from 37% in 2023, with 72% formally measuring ROI and nearly three-quarters reporting positive returns. Senior leaders are notably more optimistic about ROI, while middle managers are more skeptical and twice as likely to say it’s still too early to judge. Interns, unexpectedly, are in demand – 49% of firms plan to hire more, not fewer. The optimism contrasts with MIT’s finding earlier this year that 95% of generative AI pilots failed to reach production.
As labs reflect on model welfare and companies finally find return on theirs, the gap between capability and deployment is narrowing – even as the question of what, exactly, is being deployed grows harder to answer.
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