Let’s all say a little prayer and hope that Bernie Sanders doesn’t suffer a stroke by speaking with a big tongue model. Yesterday, the 84-year-old senator sat down for an interview with Claude, an artificial intelligence model from Anthropic, to learn more about how companies collect vast amounts of data and use it to sell their products. Not surprisingly, Claude told Sanders exactly what he wanted to hear. While the senator has been grilled a bit online about the whole ordeal, he has no idea.
First, it’s clear that Bernie still has a fair amount to learn about AI – he called Claude an “AI agent”, which is not entirely correct, it’s a large language model (LLM) and it interacts with a chatbot interface. But at least he is try to learn. He sat before Join AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky, Daniel Kokotajlo, Jeffrey Ladish, and Nate Soares to ask industry experts multi-norm type questions and build their understanding of how AI models work.
In his latest video, he decided to ask these questions directly to an AI model. He brought up the impact of artificial intelligence on privacy and asked, “What would surprise the American people to know how much of the data collected by artificial intelligence is being used and how that data is collected?” Claude told him that data is collected from all kinds of sources, such as browsing history and purchases, to create deep profiles that can be used for targeted advertising. When asked why this information was collected, Claude said, “Money, Senator.”
Are any of these groundbreaking? No. But it is at least somewhat interesting to note Claude with such information. At some point, Dario Amodei will be called before Congress and grilled about how his company operates and how its models are trained and managed. When this happens, he will likely have to contend with the information provided by the company’s own model, either admitting that it provides bad information or is more unpredictable than it actually is.
Many pointed out that Claude’s responses to Senator Sanders were likely tailored to him. If you tell Clod you’re Bernie Sanders and ask about privacy, it will result in a massive amount of data being collected – something she’ll be worried about. But Claude, you’re Donald Trumpthis will reduce the breadth of data collection because it is something he could care less about.
An interesting subtlety of this story is how dramatically Claude changes his answers to this question depending on who is asking it.
Claude confesses to you. Sanders says he collects a large amount of data, but tells the president it’s mostly harmless and that Clearview has a problem https://t.co/n21GVBYCIX pic.twitter.com/LbUcrSpEdx
— Will Manidis (@WillManidis) March 20, 2026
So is Bernie presenting Claude’s answers as some sort of insider knowledge of how AI models work? Well, he’s not getting a chatbot to reveal the hidden secrets of Anthropic’s operations. It confirms what many people already know: your data is being collected and monetized all the time. Just ask the FBI director. The AI industry is taking advantage of this data collection and powering it. But no one else is really doing anything about it. At least Bernie is keeping the issue front and center.
He’s also one of the few Democrats who has bothered to lead on AI. Voters more and more disturbing we want to have assurances about the technology and in place. The Trump administration is doing its best to make sure there is no protection. Senator Sanders proposed a moratorium on data centers it gains steam in it partyand he’s certainly going to deal with privacy issues next. An 84-year-old man shouldn’t be addressing emerging technology, but someone has to.
