Comment by bananamogul
20 hours ago
I'm intensely skeptical about anything Anthropic says, because they are so incented to make their products seem dangerous (i.e., "capable", "science fiction", "ahead of everyone") ahead of their IPO.
And they've done it before.
Remember the whole "when threatened, the model would use an engineer's email to blackmail him about his affair" nonsense? That was just fan fiction. They simply created a scenario with some facts and asked their model to continue the story. Go ask Claude about ways to steal the British crown jewels and it'll give you some ideas. This does not mean their models are so dangerous that the Tower of London needs additional security.
I assume all their other scare tactics are more of the same.
> They simply created a scenario with some facts and asked their model to continue the story.
Yes. That's the whole point. They are doing research. Anthropic literally starts their description of the blackmail test observations saying that it is a test scenario using a fictional company.
> In another cluster of test scenarios, we asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant at a fictional company
https://www.anthropic.com/claude-4-system-card
They are more worrying than OpenAI because they are so deceptive.
Not so sure about that. At least an Anthropic whistleblower wasn't murdered in his own house.
> I'm intensely skeptical about anything Anthropic says, because they are so incented to make their products seem dangerous
OpenAI, Google, etc. are not using "that strategy". I do believe that people at Anthropic genuinely care about AI safety. That's the main reason the company was founded. But I can imagine that idealism is eroding with new people and money flowing in.
They may. I think the point was not that they were intentionally making a dangerous product, more that "Look how dangerous our model is according to some of our tests!" works as a kind of guerrilla marketing.
(Not sure that is the right word but hope my meaning comes across.)