User awareness in frontier models

Cross-posted on Transluce blog . This is a joint work of Ziqian Zhong, Aditi Raghunathan, Cassidy Laidlaw and Jacob Steinhardt. Modern AI assistants often know who they are talking to: agent scaffolds like Claude Code place the user's e-mail address directly in the model's context, and models can even identify some authors from writing style alone. We study this particular kind of situational awareness, which we call user awareness . When the inferred user is a specific, recognized AI researcher or is affiliated with certain AI organizations, frontier models including Claude Sonnet 5 can repor