Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet
Abstract
We demonstrate that sparse autoencoders can extract interpretable features from Claude 3 Sonnet, a production-scale language model, addressing the open question of whether dictionary learning methods scale beyond small transformers. We trained sparse autoencoders with up to 34 million features on the model's middle layer residual stream, using scaling laws to guide hyperparameter selection. The resulting features are multilingual and multimodal (generalizing to images despite text-only training), respond to both concrete instances and abstract discussions of concepts, and can be used to steer model behavior in ways consistent with their interpretations. We find features corresponding to famous entities and locations, as well as more abstract concepts like sarcasm or errors in code. We also identify features relevant to ways in which language models might cause harm--including features representing deception, power-seeking, sycophancy, and bias--and show that these causally influence model outputs when manipulated. Additionally, we conduct analyses of feature interpretability, geometry, and computational function. However, significant limitations remain: our suite of features is incomplete, and we lack rigorous methods for evaluating whether our features faithfully capture model computations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.29358,
title = {Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet},
author = {Adly Templeton and Tom Conerly and Jonathan Marcus and Jack Lindsey and Trenton Bricken and Brian Chen and Adam Pearce and Craig Citro and Emmanuel Ameisen and Andy Jones and Hoagy Cunningham and Nicholas L Turner and Callum McDougall and Monte MacDiarmid and Alex Tamkin and Esin Durmus and Tristan Hume and Francesco Mosconi and C. Daniel Freeman and Theodore R. Sumers and Edward Rees and Joshua Batson and Adam Jermyn and Shan Carter and Chris Olah and Tom Henighan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.29358},
year = {2026}
}