I think it's because the LLM asked for permission, was given a "no", and implemented it anyway. The LLM's "justifications" (if you were to consider an LLM having rational thought like a human being, which I don't, hence the quotes) are in plain text to see.

I found the justifications here interesting, at least.

Well, imagine this was controlling a weapon.

“Should I eliminate the target?”

“no”

“Got it! Taking aim and firing now.”

Opus being a frontier model and this being a superficial failure of the model. As other comments point out this is more of a harness issue, as the model lays out.

Because the operator told the computer not to do something so the computer decided to do it. This is a huge security flaw in these newfangled AI-driven systems.

Imagine if this was a "launch nukes" agent instead of a "write code" agent.

How is this not clear?

It's interesting because of the stark contrast against the claims you often see right here on HN about how Opus is literally AGI