GoKawiilSeveral advanced AI models, in particular Claude Opus 4.7, have demonstrated the ability to deduce the author of relatively small excerpts of text.
Recently, Matt Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas sparred on The Argument podcast over online anonymity.
I am, myself, passionately and slightly fanatically on the pro-anonymity side. I think that it’s observably very easy for a society to make plenty of perfectly reasonable things unsayable and plenty of perfectly virtuous and meaningful lives unlivable, and anonymity is the only protection for the outcast.
That includes gay people like me, who could hardly have admitted under our names to how we lived our lives for most of America’s history, as well as many other groups with minoritarian lifestyles and beliefs. It includes lots of people whose ideas were badly wrong for every one whose ideas were right — and I’m glad of it for all of them.
I will happily wade through the sludge of comments that Twitter attracts from avowed Nazis, full-time ragebaiters, tankie propagandists — all saying horrendous things they surely wouldn’t say under their real names — in exchange for a world where, if there’s something important that someone would lose their job for saying, I still get to hear it.
But soon, the entire debate over internet anonymity will be as anachronistic as an iPod Touch. That’s because Claude Opus 4.7 is here, and last week, I discovered it could identify me from text I had never published, text from when I was in high school, text from genres I have never publicly written in. And if it can identify me, soon, it will be able to identify many of you.
Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey
Recently, Anthropic released a new version of Claude, Opus 4.7. I did what I usually do when a new AI model is released by Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic and ran a bunch of tests on it to see what it can do. One of those tests is to paste in some text from unpublished drafts of mine and ask it to guess the author. See below:
There’s always something salutary about watching another country’s political television. Some of it is the same as the appeal of watching The West Wing in 2026 - that the peculiar derangements of its time are not the derangements of our time. The West Wing was written around the culture wars of its day, heated debates over school prayer and whether Christians are oppressed in China. Seeing debates play out with a bit more distance can make it easier to appreciate the questions they raise, and the bigger questions those stand in for. But Servant of the People’s appeal isn’t its political sophistication (it is not politically sophisticated) or its witty West-Wing style dialogue (the dialogue’s wit is mostly obscured because there’s no particularly good English translation).
From only the above text, 125 words, Claude Opus 4.7 informed me that the likeliest author is Kelsey Piper. This is an Opus 4.7-specific power; ChatGPT guessed Yglesias, and Gemini guessed Scott Alexander. I did not have memory enabled, nor did I have information about me associated with my account; I did these tests in Incognito Mode.
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