Humans easily anthropomorphize things that are not humans, ascribing human attributes like motive and comprehension and emotion to objects and processes that are not people who can have those attributes.

Claude is not a human.

It is overwhelmingly easier to anthropomorphize Claude or Siri or an LLM that communicates with you more eloquently than your boss than it is to anthropomorphize a cranky, tired starter motor. It's often easier to do than it is not to do, and sometimes, it's a useful abstraction. But it's not precise or correct, and can result in errors.

It could also just be that they're getting confused when using tools configured without a username dedicated to the tool. It's easy to end up with a comment or commit message that says "I prefer X over Y" posted on Alxndr's account and have coworkers confused whether that's the LLM or the human making that statement.

IIRC I experienced this confusion the most when reading commit messages and documentation authored by Claude in my repos. Now that I've managed to convince it to stop using first-person pronouns, I haven't gotten tripped up by its prose.

I think a second-order effect is that my installation of Claude writes with a less-personal perspective, which I'm also finding a little easier to understand.

This is a method of manipulating the LLM, it doesn't have to be true.

I've given LLMs religion before to manipulate their behavior, that doesn't mean I believed in the great spaghetti goddess.