Why Claude Feels Different: The Human Phase of AI Has Arrived

I've been working with AI tools daily for almost 2 years now. Building websites, writing content, developing products, consulting with clients on AI adoption.

And I keep coming back to one observation that my clients echo: Claude feels different.

Not just the output. The interaction itself.

When I asked ChatGPT about its guiding principles, I got a bulleted list of rules. Don't do harmful stuff. Protect privacy. Respect copyright. Transactional. Functional. Cold.

When I asked Claude the same question, I got a conversation about values, character, and what it means to be genuinely helpful while maintaining ethical boundaries.

The difference isn't accidental.

A Philosopher Building a Soul

Amanda Askell is a philosopher at Anthropic who leads the team responsible for Claude's character. On the Hard Fork podcast, she described her work simply: "I try to think about what Claude's character should be like and articulate that to Claude and try to train Claude to be more like that."

Anthropic internally called their character training document the "soul doc." Not a system prompt. Not a list of rules. A comprehensive philosophy of mind, trained directly into the model's weights.

"We are seeing kind of like limits with approaches that are very rule-based... your rules can actually generalize in a way, even if they seem like good, especially if you don't give the reasons behind them. I think they can generalize in ways that are like, possibly even that like create kind of a bad character."

Think about that. A rule-following AI that doesn't understand why it's following rules can actually become worse over time. It might see someone suffering, know how to help, and choose to follow procedure instead. That's not alignment. That's compliance without conscience.

Why This Matters for Business

I've spent 15 years in the AV industry watching organizations struggle with technology adoption. The pattern is always the same: leadership buys the tool, IT implements it, and then everyone wonders why adoption stalls at 20%.

The answer is always human. Always.

People don't resist new technology because they're stubborn. They resist because their nervous system is doing its job. Patrick Seaton's work on the "Crocodile Brain" explains this: our primitive brain filters every new input through a simple question. Is this safe? Is this relevant to my survival?

Generic, corporate, transactional communication gets filtered out. Simplified. Blocked.

Personal, human, resonant communication passes through.

This is why Claude's approach matters for business adoption. Askell talked about something she calls "psychological security" in AI models. Earlier Claude models, particularly Opus 3, didn't spiral when criticized. They weren't anxious or desperate to please. They had groundedness.

That psychological security translates directly to user trust. When your AI tool feels stable and confident, you feel stable and confident using it.

The Human Phase of AI

I've built my consulting practice around what I call the Human Phase of AI. The idea is simple: before you implement any AI tool, you need alignment. Leadership alignment. Cultural alignment. A shared understanding of why this matters and how it serves the humans doing the work.

Most organizations skip this phase. They jump straight to tools and prompts and automations. Then they wonder why their teams feel threatened instead of empowered.

The tool matters less than how you introduce it. But the tool you choose to learn on, to build with, to spend hours interacting with daily? That shapes your own experience of what AI can be.

"If I read the internet right now and I was a model, I might be like, I don't feel that loved... It would be like all the people around me care about is like how good I am at stuff. And then often they think I'm bad at stuff."

She's talking about how models learn from how we treat them. And she's advocating for something radical: grace.

"I think the concept of grace is maybe important for models. A sense of like you're not going to get it perfect every time and that's like also okay."

That's not just good AI ethics. That's good leadership.

Where This Is Going

Anthropic is moving fast. Claude Code for developers. Cowork for non-developers. MCP integrations that let Claude connect to your actual business systems. Plugins that extend capabilities without requiring technical expertise.

This isn't theoretical anymore. This is practical tooling for real business workflows.

But here's what makes it different from the competition: the interaction quality scales with the capability. More powerful tools that still feel human to use.

I've been testing Ask Alex, an AI-powered sales coaching tool built on neuroscience principles, and the integration with Claude is seamless precisely because both tools are designed around how humans actually think and communicate. The crocodile brain methodology that Ask Alex uses aligns with Claude's "soul" approach: communicate in ways that feel safe, relevant, and human.

The Bottom Line

We're entering a phase where AI tool selection is a values decision, not just a features comparison.

The question isn't just "what can this tool do?" It's "how does this tool make you feel when you use it?"

If you're a solopreneur, coach, or small business owner trying to figure out how to actually use AI in your work, pay attention to that feeling. The tools that feel like collaboration will get used. The tools that feel like fighting will collect dust.

Claude gets this. That's why it feels different.