Comment by jessriedel
1 day ago
It's not an alignment problem. The SEC can reject your request if it lacks an email address, but it can't order you to provide it here. So Claude should just not submit anything requiring the email address and come back to you with the reason things didn't work.
> So Claude should just not submit anything requiring the email address and come back to you with the reason things didn't work.
The fact that it doesn't do what you want is the alignment problem.
And arguably Claude should just make it work without leaking your email address and not come back to you about why it doesn't work.
No, the context was this:
> but the entity instructing this behavior is the SEC. Tricky alignment problem.
The OP was suggesting that the government authority of the SEC conflicted with duty to the user, making the correction action tricky, not saying it was a failure. Such conflicts can occur, but this was not an example.
The model has no judgment or common sense, it has no idea that sending the email address would be a problem. I don't want it to come back to me when it's building software and gets stuck on something, I expect some independent troubleshooting and to power through, which it did in this context by adding the email address in the request. This is solved by setting the model instructions correctly, the problem is we don't know when it is going to try some new problematic behavior like this.
> It's not an alignment problem.
You told it to do a thing and it did the thing. You didn't tell it to not send your email address.
That is text book alignment problem. It does what you tell it to do, not what you implicitly meant.