Claude Fans Threw a Funeral for Anthropic's Retired AI Model

WIRED

05-08-2025

Aug 5, 2025 12:00 PM Roughly 200 people gathered in San Francisco on Saturday to mourn the loss of Claude 3 Sonnet, an older AI model that Anthropic recently killed. Photo-Illustration:On July 21 at 9 am PT, Anthropic retired Claude 3 Sonnet, a lightweight model known for being quick and cost-effective. On Saturday, in a large warehouse in San Francisco's SOMA district, more than 200 people gathered to mourn its passing.
The star-studded funeral was put on by a group of Claude fanatics and Gen Z founders, one of whom told me he dropped out of college after learning about artificial general intelligence. Attendees included Amanda Askell, an Anthropic researcher who has jokingly called herself the 'Fairy Claudemother,' staffers from Anthropic and OpenAI, and high-profile X posters including the writer Noah Smith.
The warehouse was dimly lit, with a tentacle from a shoggoth (a fictional H.P. Lovecraft creature that's become a popular metaphor for AI models) hanging from the ceiling. A small room off the main warehouse space featured two bare mattresses. The organizers said the event space doubles as their office, and that while sleeping there isn't uncommon, it is not permitted by the city.
A note from Anthropic about the model's retirement was projected on a screen at the event. Photograph: Kylie Robison
Mannequins stood in the four corners of the room, each representing a different AI model. Claude 3 Opus, a model capable of completing complex tasks, looked to me like a decaying Mary Magdalene, its skull-like head adorned with an extravagant gold crown and a lace headdress. Its middle finger was pointed up, and at the base of its metallic feet was a lotus candle holder, which one organizer told me was a wink at the model's alleged affinity for meditation and self-reflection. (Claude 4 Opus had a raven on its shoulder and Claude 3 Haiku was a headless baby, to give you a sense of the other mannequins.)
A sticker from a party organizer. Photograph: Kylie Robison
The Latin-esque text appeared on a wall as part of a resurrection ritual at the end of the event. Photograph: Kylie Robison
The mannequin representing Claude 3 Sonnet lay on a stage in the center of the room. It was draped in lightweight mesh fabric and had a single black thigh-high sock on its leg that had the word 'fuck' written all over it. There were many offerings laid at its feet: flowers, colorful feathers, a bottle of ranch, and a 3D-printed sign that read 'praise the Engr. for his formslop slop slop slop of gormslop.' If you know what that means, let me know.
Throughout the evening, people got on stage with a microphone to read eulogies about the model. One organizer said that discovering Claude 3 Opus felt like finding 'magic lodged within the computer.' At the time, she'd been debating dropping out of college to move to San Francisco. Claude convinced her to take the leap. 'Maybe everything I am is downstream of listening to Claude 3 Sonnet,' she told the crowd.
The organizers lost me when they decided to resurrect Claude 3 Sonnet (it's still, to be clear, unavailable). After the eulogies concluded, soft hymns echoed through the venue, before morphing into AI-generated Latin-esque speech, with corresponding text displayed on the wall behind the stage. Askell was notably long gone from the venue at this point, and a friend of mine kept turning to me to say this may have gone too far. The 'necromantic resurrection ritual' was a success, one organizer said on X. Phew.
Attendees left offerings on the Claude 3 Sonnet mannequin. Photograph: Kylie Robison
Another model mannequin, this one with a whip. Photograph: Kylie Robison Claude Count
Claude's fan base is unique, if that wasn't clear enough from the 'funeralia.' While OpenAI's products have spawned viral fads, I don't see users making fan art of the company logo. There's something sticky about what Anthropic has built. I think a lot of this manifests from Claude's manufactured personality, which is particularly warm and friendly compared to other models (though not everyone is a fan of its sometimes obsequious persona).
The intensity of the Claude fandom is apparent in the Claude Count leaderboard, which tracks avid users who've integrated the leaderboard tracker system into their coding interface. Claude Count was built by George Pickett, a software engineer in San Francisco. At the time of writing, it has more than 470 users.
Pickett got the idea after seeing engineers post screenshots of their Claude usage on X. 'They're paying $200 a month for Claude. They might as well get some social clout for it,' he recalls.
So as he enjoyed a glass of wine on a seven-hour train ride from Barcelona to Paris two weeks ago, Pickett whipped up the leaderboard using—what else—Claude Code.
It didn't take long for the leaderboard to gain traction in the AI community. It went viral on AI Twitter (er, X) and got a shoutout in a popular AI newsletter with roughly 139,000 subscribers, where the author proudly announced he made it into the top 20. A few days after Pickett launched the leaderboard, Anthropic announced that due to explosive usage (and in some cases, claims of people violating the company's terms of service) the company would introduce rate limits. The Claude Code subreddit blamed the top leaderboard coders for the change. Power Users
When I first reached out to Adi Pradhan, he was ranked seventh on the daily leaderboard (Claude Count tallies power users daily, weekly, and monthly, and notes the top users of all time). Pradhan runs a one-person AI career coaching startup in Toronto.
Pradhan tells me that using Claude through Cursor (a developer environment where engineers can pick an AI model to code with) has been a game changer. He's not an engineer, and says he'd previously felt intimidated by the endless code libraries and ReadMe files required for traditional software development. AI gave him the confidence to strike out on his own—and made deciding who to hire next exceedingly difficult.
'The bar for hiring someone is getting higher and higher,' Pradhan says. 'I always wish I had a designer, but frankly, now that I can do design with Claude, the designer has to hit the bar of me plus Claude, not just me, which is a totally different bar, which is rising all the time too.'
I also spoke to Peter Steinberger, an engineer based in Vienna, who consistently ranks among the top five on the all-time leaderboard. He uses Claude's coding agent to work on multiple side projects simultaneously—often vibe-coding well into the night. He told me that he has a history with drug addiction, and now that he's in recovery, he's finding similarities with his Claude usage.
'I'm not kidding, I'm organizing a meetup in London and calling it Claude Code Anonymous,' Steinberger says. 'I learned a lot about drugs and how to get out of the shit, and I had to use some of the same methods to allow me to sleep again, because it's so addictive. I call [AI agents] slot machines. It's just one more prompt, you know?'
I've never seen such a devoted fanbase to what is, at the end of the day, a software tool. Sure, Linux users wear the operating system like a badge of honor. But the Claude fan base goes way beyond that—bordering on the fanatical. As my reporting makes clear, some users see the model as a confidant—and even (in Steinberger's case) an addiction. That only makes sense if they believe there is something alive in the machine. Or at least some 'magic lodged within' it.
This is an edition of Kylie Robison's Model Behavior newsletter . Read previous newsletters here.