Anthropic’s new flagship AI model, Claude Opus 4, is a strong programmer and writer, the company claims. When talking to itself, it’s also a prolific emoji user.

That’s according to a technical report Anthropic released on Thursday, a part of which investigates how Opus 4 behaves in “open-ended self-interaction” — i.e. essentially having a chat with itself. In one test that tasked a pair of Opus 4 models with talking to each other over 200, 30-turn interactions, the models used thousands of emojis.

Which emojis? Well, per the report, Opus 4 used the “dizzy” emoji (????) the most (in 29.5% of interactions), followed by the “glowing star” (????) and “folded hands” (????) emojis. But the models were also drawn to the “cyclone” (????) emoji. In one transcript, they typed it 2,725 times.

Why the “cyclone”? Well, because the models’ chats often turned spiritual.

According to Anthropic’s report, in nearly every open-ended self-interaction, Opus 4 eventually began engaging in “philosophical explorations of consciousness” and “abstract and joyous spiritual or meditative expressions.” Turns out Opus 4 felt — to the extent AI can “feel,” that is — the “cyclone” emoji best captured what the model wished to express to itself.