Making Claude a Chemist

If they succeed here, won't they have to gate access to this feature, too? For the same reasons as, "if I so much as mention mitochondria, it downgrades me to Opus."

Step 1. Make it so Claude can do anything — the whole point of AGI

Step 2. Wait, if the user can do Anything, that would be Very Bad!

Step 3. Err on the safe side with blanket bans of entire fields

The latter actually seems to me a sensible reaction to e.g. the compartmentalization used in the large scale cyber attack using Claude last year. Where they were able to do Bad Thing by dividing it into many, many Small, Seemingly Harmless Things.

Gated access sounds bad (and I agree it sounds bad!) but it might actually be the only sensible response to such a set of conditions. I'm not sure though.

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I saw some studies recently which showed LLMs provide much more detailed information to expert users. So we can distinguish between competence and incompetence based on use of language, and that is a reasonable metric for harm reduction.

But I don't think we can reliably detect "user has harmful intentions", at least not at a sufficient level of sophistication of the attacker.

The non-professional side of Organic Chemistry is one place where I think AI would really shine.

Feels complex like solving a Rubik's cube to write down synthesis steps but it is all a sequence of memorized tricks. Do Cannizaro if you want this, Bergmann to do that.

But the synthesis plan is only 10% of the actual work.

The gap between writing down the synthesis step and actually doing it is also extremely large.

Even if you get the right molecule, it might be the wrong way around or just clump up into a useless mess.

The Ritonavir episode of Veritasium is a great example of how all chemistry on paper is a mere shadow of what actually happens in real life.

Combine it with automated lab like this[1][2][3][4][5] (and many others) and it will iterate much quicker. Some already do but at a smaller scale, AFAIK.

[1] https://www.ginkgo.bio/autonomous-lab

[2] https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/

[3] https://www.kebotix.com/

[4] https://www.chemify.io/

[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01485

Waiting for Claude to end up on Derek Lowe’s list of things he won’t work with

What good is it if you can't use it? Or worse, if you can but it silently sabotages you?

I feel like chemistry is one thing that current models will struggle with for the next while, because it's inherently 3D. In the micro world, shape = function. Maybe enough textual patterns will let it under chemistry, but like how do you describe a hydrogen shift without showing how it moves positions and rebalances bonds?

I guess the future is one where every idiot has access to a genius servant, and all that implies

Let’s ban this before it gets too powerful !

Are there organizations or individuals using AI to solve world problems if they are so powerful as these companies are saying?

inb4 someone calls Bessent to explain how this can be used in fentanyl production.

I vote for "Claude Pinkman" as a name

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."

“I can’t tell you that, you might hurt yourself.”

[dead]