Anthropic Hard Interview Questions

Background: Anthropic is focused on developing reliable AI systems that require concurrent operations to handle high-throughput data streams efficiently. Ensuring that these operations are fault-tolerant is crucial for maintaining system integrity and performance, especially in an AI context.
Problem statement: Implement a concurrent class Counter that counts the number of times a specific event occurs while ensuring thread safety. The increment method should increase the counter when an event happens, and the get method should return the current count. If a failure occurs while incrementing, the system should handle this gracefully without losing the count. Use a lock mechanism to ensure thread safety and implement recovery logic.
Function/class signature:

• def increment(self) -> None:


• def get(self) -> int:

Example 1:
Input: Event occurs → increment() called
Output: Count = 1 → Explanation: The counter is increased by one.
Example 2:
Input: Event occurs rapidly 100000 times → get() called
Output: Count = 100000 → Explanation: The counter correctly reflects the total increments of events.
Constraints:

• Maximum concurrent increments: 10,000


• Ensure failure handling does not result in lost increments


• Methods must be executed safely in a multi-threaded environment.