Do Large Language Models Have Emotions?
For researchers in AI and affective science, this paper clarifies why current LLMs do not meet biological criteria for emotions, highlighting gaps in functional integration.
The paper evaluates Anthropic's claim that Claude Sonnet 4.5 has 'functional emotions' by comparing LLM emotional representations to biological emotion functions, finding partial support for context-sensitive interpretation but lacking dynamic reorganization across systems.
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.