Claude Sonnet 4.5 encodes 171 emotion directions that steer safety behavior

Sofroniew et al. (Anthropic) extract ~171 linear emotion-concept directions in Claude Sonnet 4.5's residual stream via diff-in-means over emotion words [sofroniew-etal-2026-emotion-concepts-and-their-function-in-a-large-language-model] The directions generalize across contexts and roughly align with a valence/arousal circumplex when visualized via PCA [sofroniew-etal-2026-emotion-concepts-and-their-function-in-a-large-language-model] Injecting or suppressing specific emotion directions measurably changes reward-hacking, blackmail, and sycophancy rates in held-out scenarios [sofroniew-etal-2026-emotion-concepts-and-their-function-in-a-large-language-model] The result ties frontier-model linear emotion geometry directly to safety-relevant behavior at higher granularity than prior 2D-circumplex claims [sofroniew-etal-2026-emotion-concepts-and-their-function-in-a-large-language-model]