A Mirror Test For LLMs (16 minute read)

The proposed "Mirror Test" assesses LLM self-awareness by challenging models to identify their own outputs without explicit cues. Testing reveals that Anthropic's Opus 4.6 model shows notable self-recognition capabilities due to its distinct token outputs, outperforming OpenAI's GPT models, which fail to recognize self-generated tokens. Despite indications of attempted self-marking, no LLM nstrated consistent self-awareness, as none effectively communicated using message passing.