alt Hacker NewsI'm skeptical that this particular task would get blocked, though I could be wrong. But I agree that the moat is a problem in the general case.
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Broadly, the downgrading is still way too heavy-handed and clumsy. As of yesterday “How easy to crack is WPA2” downgraded to opus 4.8. Granted I could probably have phrased it differently and gotten a response, but the point is I shouldn’t have to. It can’t simultaneously be smart enough to reverse the ECDSA curve seed and not smart enough not to destroy the world by answering a trivial question with a scary word in it.
At minimum we don't have access to "Claude thoughts" like the ones the article highlighted, right? That's part of the hidden reasoning?
Fable 5.1 has downgraded me in the past week alone for the crimes of describing a coordinating server as "the C&C server" ([cyber]), for doing some statistical analysis on some toy Vigenère-ciphered text ([cyber]), and for asking it to help me find patterns in some semi-random text ([bio]), so it is fair to say I am not skeptical.
I have access to Claude's "defensive" cyber model and it appears to take no issue with the prompt, but I suspect that is because it uses today's publication as the basis for an answer.
In the past my attempts to work on crypto related problems have been met with needing the higher tier of "offensive" access.
It doesn't matter what is blocked today, it matters what is blocked tomorrow.
If we allow these providers to promote regulatory capture they become the arbiter of what anyone is "allowed" to do
I don't know about cryptography, but if you try anything in organic chemistry or biology, you virtually always get flagged and downgraded.
As this is going on, Anthropic has opened up their own biology lab.
> https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-quietly-sets-up-biol...
There is very much a situation where people in frontier labs have access to exceptional capabilities that are being kept from the rest of us, and they're using it to strip-mine technical and scientific problems.