Do LLMs have emotions? A recent paper from Anthropic reports finding internal representations of emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5, concluding that the LLM has 'functional emotions.' We evaluate this claim against what is known about how emotions actually function in biological systems. We argue that emotions serve two core functions: the context-sensitive interpretation of situations, and the reorganization of processing across multiple systems in response to those interpretations. The Anthropic findings offer partial support for the first function, though the consistent, discrete emotional representations identified in Claude sit uneasily with affective neuroscience findings that human emotion is characterized by variable rather than uniform neural signatures. On the second function, the evidence is mixed: Claude's representations modulate output without producing the dynamic reorganization of attention, decision speed, and motivational state that defines emotion in biological systems. We close by proposing what it would take for an LLM to have emotions.

翻译：大语言模型（LLM）有情感吗？Anthropic 公司最近的一篇论文报告称，在 Claude Sonnet 4.5 中发现了情感概念的内部表征，并得出结论认为该 LLM 具备“功能性情感”。我们基于情感在生物系统中实际运作的已知原理对该论断进行了评估。我们认为情感具有两个核心功能：对情境进行情境敏感的解释，以及根据这些解释对多个系统的处理过程进行重组。Anthropic 的发现为第一个功能提供了部分支持，尽管在 Claude 中识别出的这种一致、离散的情感表征与情感神经科学的发现存在矛盾，后者表明人类情感的特征是可变的而非统一的神经信号特征。对于第二个功能，证据则相互矛盾：Claude 的表征调节了输出，但并未产生定义生物系统情感的那种注意力、决策速度和动机状态的动态重组。最后，我们提出了 LLM 要具备情感所需的条件。