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andaiyesterday at 4:49 PM2 repliesview on HN

Anthropic mentioned explicitly making an effort to make Opus 4.7 worse at cybersecurity tasks because the last few generations have been getting too good at them.

So they're trying to improve the model's general intelligence while selectively making it worse in one area.


Replies

philipkglassyesterday at 6:00 PM

It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter. [1]

I think that the best use of frontier AI models outside of generic corporate settings is going to be building generic frameworks and procedures for training specialized models. No ethically-trained American coding model would ever consent to write a Plutonium Process Engineering agent. But you can get it to write a general framework for pretraining models and preparing them for agentic usage, to which the copious published literature on plutonium production could be given as a data set.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/your-favorite-programming-quot...

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cyanydeezyesterday at 7:01 PM

Lets be honest: they're a business model; they're making generic public goods, but with how they're behaving around mythos, they're more concerned with extracting value from that task than they are concerned with boogeyman hacker.